[lug] Re: Wi-Fi Firewall

[jef vratny]

Thanks for all the input and advice folks. I ended up buying an old toshiba
laptop for about the cost of a regular box and 2 PCI sleds to do the job
last night. I know, just begging for more headaches ;o)

I'll probably just set it up to run as a bridge/firewall/router/dhcp server
and hang my linksys AP off a regular PCMCIA NIC card for starters.

Once I get that setup running I'll go back in and try to get the AP
infrastructure portion to work. The card bridging to the WISP is going to
have to be an Orinoco, i don't think any of the other PCMCIA cards offer a
way to connect an external antenna. BTW, I've never had a problem w/the
pigtails on these, the one i'm using right now has been accidentally yanked
out a few times and still works fine. The other card will have to be one of
the other models that doesn't have the big honkin ledge on the end in order
for it to fit in the slot. I'm wondering if that will cause even more
issues, but you never know until you try ;o)

>The Prism based cards have a host-ap driver which can give you a great
>deal of flexibility.  I don't know if the other chipsets have similar
>drivers under linux.  As long as you pick channels far enough apart (in
>frequency, 3 channels is the recommended spacing) you shouldn't have
>too many problems with interference (provided you don't have other
>devices around you, crowding your spectrum).

I think Jason's right about the channel separation being sufficient to avoid
interference , I've got my Linksys AP sitting right next to the Orinoco card
on my laptop on channels 4 and 6 respectively and haven't experienced any
problems.

I'll let you all know how it works out.

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// jef vratny
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