[geeks] Wireless AP

[Dan Duncan]

On Thu, 12 Feb 2004, David Selders wrote:
> My current firewall/NAT/Wireless AP appears to be failing, so it's time
> to find a new one.  I just wanted to get some opinions on good models
> and the models to stay far far away from.  I currently have a netgear
> MR314 that I have had for a while now.  It's been pretty good unit,
> except I wish I would have just bought an access point instead.  Any
> words of wisdom before I begin my search?

If you like Netgear, you can get the WGR614 for $44.99 after rebate:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00008SCFL/002-7475280-5211264

I have a couple of netgear non-wireless also (RT311 and RT314) and
I've been quite happy with them.  I think my favorite feature is
that they have a nice serial console and a telnet interface so I don't
have to deal with some horrible web interface to do every little thing.
I don't know about your model of netgear or the wireless one above.

That said, I'm using a DLink for my wireless segment because of
the price at the time.  (ONLY a web interface for everything)
When it goes Tango Uniform I'll probably get something else.
(Perhaps a frankenpix?)

[The rest is info about the magnia router/server appliance.
 Feel free to skip to the next message]
Oh, I did finally zap the netmax/redhat install on my magnia SG20
and am now playing with a clean redhat 9 install on it.  It has
a pccard slot in it for use as a wireless AP so maybe I'll play
with that.  I'll probably try *bsd on it eventually as well, but
I started with redhat because obviously the hardware is supported.
I opened up the magnia to see what was inside and found an ATX
motherboard with 2s/1p/floppy/kb/mouse/AGP/modem and a daughterboard
with IDE/dual ethernet(1 Eepro100, 1 Realtek 8139)/pccard.
It's probably possible to pop an AGP video card in there, but
doing so would prevent the use of the daughtercard (and thus
the hard drive(s) and ethernet) without fabbing some sort of
connecting cable so I just installed onto an empty drive in another
system and moved the hard drive and kept the original drive as
the secondary.  So far, so good.  I'm still migrating some of
my old config files (sendmail.cf, apache setup, etc) but it's
most definitely alive again.

-DanD

-- 
#  Dan Duncan (kd4igw)  dand at pcisys.net  http://pcisys.net/~dand
# What is it that makes a complete stranger dive into an icy river to save a
# solid gold baby? Maybe we'll never know.  -DEEP THOUGHTS