wired->wireless expansion of home network

rob1891

Need some advise in connecting the house to our wireless broadband ...

Right now I have a very simple setup, a 100Mhz FreeBSD box running nat and ipfw with two interfaces. 1 connected to the broadband and one via cross over to our other PC.

I want to expand this by 1 pc downstairs and 1 laptop (where ever).

I have 3 options I can see:

buy a switch and a wireless accesspoint and use the switch to connect the nat_box, the current pc and the accesspoint, then wireless cards for the two new machines ... 3 devices always on

buy a wireless router, that will have a wired switch built in and connect up as above, disable routing on the router (if possible) this begs the question why have my FreeBSD box at all (cause I want to!) ... 2 devices always on

Or the coolest, probably most time consuming ... add a wireless interface to the BSD box and use it as a wireless access point as well as nat/firewall/etc ... 1 device always on!

What I need from you boards types is some advise! How badly would the wireless lan will effect my wireless broadband (IBB) and visa versa? Can routing/firewall/crap be turned off on a wireless router? Should I ditch the idea of my BSD firewall and just run it behind a router as a boring do nothing box? Has anyone else done the *nix wireless ap thing?

Thanks!

Rob

jesus_thats_gre

I am presuming that you have the broadband up and running already!

If this is the case, just buy and standard Wireless Access Point and connect this to the Wired Lan you are using at the moment, for example to a switch or Hub. Have this sitting behind the BSD box you have already and you should be off.

rob1891

just buy and standard Wireless Access Point and connect this to the Wired Lan you are using at the moment

that's the jist of option 1. The only thing I have against it is having to plug in so much ****, bsd box, switch, acess point. I guess that's a silly preoccupation.

Right now I'm thinking I will investigate 11g cards and buy a few, see if I can get anything going on the bsd box, and if not buy the a/p & switch.

jesus_thats_gre

I would be inclined to leave all the bits seperate.. expecially the AP, no partiuclar reason really.. suppose is one fails they all fail

Rew

Originally posted by rob1891
that's the jist of option 1. The only thing I have against it is having to plug in so much ****, bsd box, switch, acess point. I guess that's a silly preoccupation.

Right now I'm thinking I will investigate 11g cards and buy a few, see if I can get anything going on the bsd box, and if not buy the a/p & switch.

There is no support for g atm under bsd/linux but that shouldn't matter i have this AP http://www.vbnets.com/products/page.php?id=11 and it works fine as b/g AP. Just remember if u have g and b clients u only get b preformance...

Capt'n Midnight

www.irishwan.org/board
www.dublinwan.org

If you can see IBB then you should be able to also link into the WAN.

check with IBB on what frequency they are using - WiFi uses 2.4GHz - if they use a different one there should be no problem

Since the IBB connection is outside and should be using legal amounts of power (!) then it should cause no inteference to anything in the house.

There also exists a beta version of BSD on two floppies using orinoco cards as either clients or Ap's

no HDD - no AP - no switch - no CD ..... (and since it will run on a 486 no fan on the processor - so no noise)

rob1891

There is no support for g atm under bsd/linux but that shouldn't matter i have this AP http://www.vbnets.com/products/page.php?id=11 and it works fine as b/g AP. Just remember if u have g and b clients u only get b preformance...

I've found some prism based 11b PCI cards for my *nix support, netgear MA311. www.seattlewireless.net says they work well with hostap, so I will go without a/p for now.

In my travels through time I've read that there is an 11g chipset (Atheros) that a guy named Sam has made a driver for (probably ported/involved in the sourceforge effort) ...

http://groups.google.ie/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&threadm=QEaLa.40066%24Ab2.67676%40sccrnsc01&rnum=3&prev=/groups%3Fhl%3Den%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26q%3Dfreebsd%2B802.11g%26meta%3D%26sa%3DN%26tab%3Dwg

But PCI versions are hard to find, and it's all a bit expensive! I figure if the netgear cards work I will have something up and running and I can wait for drivers to stabilise and prices to go down on the 11g stuff.

I do like the v+ quiet pc, there is also meshbox, which can be used to make a wireless mesh, or just as an accesspoint, runs of a compact flash card.

However, though you'll probably tell me it's bad practise in firewall building, I'd like to have a shell, compilers, some tools, webserver, mutt, tin etc etc a place to run my projects from and try out stuff from work/college. So I'm sticking with full blown bsd. The box is in a study (of sorts, more like a bombed out computer factory) and it can't be heard through the walls or roof! So the noise I can handle. I might put a scsi harddrive in and **** that up though

Don't know if I could connect to the dublinWan with my current setup, the box has 4 pci slots, 2 are filled with wired network (internet comes in on ethernet and the home lan), one will be home wlan and the other is a graphics card (don't think the bios will let me boot up without it *checks*... nope). So there is no space for the wan in my little box, bigger box I hear you say! I don't know, IBB might not be too happy if I were sharing out my connection, plus 3 wlans in the one house sounds like a problem?

Anyway, I be back with news!

Rob

quozl

i've something similar. 2 prism 2 cards running in AP mode under hostap in my pc, one for an omni on the roof, and one for my internal network. I like having the cards in the pc instead of seperate AP's, as it's a bit cheaper, more techy fun, and you can use them for passive sniffing to see what networks are out there.

IBB use 2.4 gig too, but there shouldn't be a problem. I'd a 2.4 gig omni on the roof, and whether it was on or off didnt seem to affect the IBB connection. IBB's connection will be highly directional, and they would have refused to install unless you had a very good signal to noise ratio, so it shouldnt be a problem.

Greg

rob1891

Bought 2 netgear MA311 and a pcmcia MA401 from dsl-wharehouse.co.uk on monday, arrived today and only an evening of work and I seem to have everything going!! configuring FreeBSD was far too easy

One of the links is a bit flaky, so I might buy one of them desktop antenna things, wait until there is more equipment I want though. (Freed up a PCI slot so dublinwan is a possibility!)

Thanks all!!