Wireless gurus

[Keith Morse]

On Mon, 3 Mar 2003, Condon Thomas A KPWA wrote:

> 
> Folks,
> 
> I've got DSL with a modem/firewall/router that has PCMCIA card capability
> (Actiontec), and I'll be receiving soon a laptop (Powerbook) with the
> AirPort card included.
> 
> My question regards base station wireless cards.  Do they require more
> capabilities than the normal laptop card?  Or will any ethernet card that
> meets 802.11b work?  If I'm running three laptops with wireless cards at
> once will I have collision problems if I put a normal card into my router?
> What I don't know about wireless (or most things) could fill volumes.  In
> fact, I think O'Reily already wrote several of them.


Answers in the order they were asked.

1.	As David explained base station cards (I'm assuming pcmcia here) 
	are no different than pcmcia cards for the laptop.  They are the 
	radios.

2.	Ethernet cards are not 802.11b cards different specs.

3.	Yes you will but in a similiar vain to ethernet.  A few collisions
	are expected and livable.  Many collisions are not.

What you describe is a pretty minimal setup and would not expect you to 
have problems.  Course that's assuming you're not compiling software 
across nfs shares that are accessed via wireless.

I would like to point out one thing I've seen so far just doing a cursory 
check using netstumbler so far.  Use the infrastructure mode and use WEP.  
There are way too many AP's (base stations) that are just wide open and 
have broadband internet access.

Also IIRC, AirPort cards are based on Orinoco chipsets or out and out 
relabeled Orinoco cards.  Orinoco cards are very well supported in Linux 
in the kernel-pcmcia code.  And, unfortunately (depends on your point of 
view really), not all 802.11b is the same.  Tried to get a Dlink bridge to 
associate with an Orinoco AP last week to no avail.  The Dlink was a 810+ 
.