Some observations after deploying a Linksys wireless home network

Greetings all,

I've just finished successfully (more or less) deploying a Linksys
"Wireless-G Network Kit for Notebooks" (WKPC54G), consisting of a
WRT54G broadband router/WAP and a WPC54G (ver 4) PCMCIA wireless
adapter. I thought I'd share my experience, and perhaps see if others
may have run into what I have. WRT54G Router is running firmware
ver 1.55.02; Win2K SP/4 client is running driver 1.22.1.2004. Both
these versions are most recent available on Linksys support web site.

* Linksys tech support VERY disappointing & frustrating

First, it took me the better part of a week to finally get this
installation stable and functional. Linksys support was bad, to be
kind.

The Linksys knowledge base was virtually useless; it appeared that only
the simplest of 'how do I connect...' sorts of issues were present.
There didn't seem to be any tecnical depth to the content.

I attempted their on-line, interactive help, and after leaving
the 'someone will be with you shortly' dialog box up and open for 6+
hours, no one ever responded.

I then tried email support, which was promised for 24 hour response,
and didn't get anything back for more than 36 hours. The response was
useless - paraphrasing: "Gee, you've done everthing I can think of;
better call someone for phone support."

Finally, I did use phone support, and it was not helpful. In fact,
significant pieces of the support information offered turned out to
be simply mistaken.

Most disappointing for what I believed a premium priced product from a
reputable (Cisco-owned) networking equipment company would offer.
Ultimately I figured out how to make this stuff work through many hours
of experimentation. It just should not have been this difficult to make
this work. I work with networking for a living; I can only imagine what
a nightmare this would be for someone lacking networking knowledge and
skills.

* Can't disable SSID when using DHCP address assignment.

Being security conscious, it made sense to me not to broadcast my SSID.
I quickly discovered what I subsequently found to be reported
elsewhere - that disabling the SSID broadcast resulted in my clients
not being able to connect to the router. Experimentation revealed that
enabling SSID broadcast allowed clients to connect, with no changes
whatever to the client wireless access connection profile.

* WEP vs WAP

Again, being security conscious, I wanted to use WAP instead of WEP for
encryption. After much teeth gnashing and hair pulling (and I don't
have much hair left to pull, either!), I discovered that my son's HP
Pavilion laptop with built-in Broadcom wireless adapter and running
WinXP/SP2 would continuously disconnect/re-connect when the router and
client were configured for WAP.

Furthermore this behavior appeared to cause significant disruption in
the router, because two other connected clients (another wireless
client and a cat 5 copper connected client) were also continuously
getting their network connections dropped and re-connected. This
behavior essentially made the network useless.

After experimentation, I discovered that my Win2K/SP4-based laptop with
the Linksys WPC54G adapter, using the Linksys-provided WLAN Monitor
application, could be successfully configured for and connected using
WAP. However, the minute I configured and activated my son's HP Pavilion
wireless connection for WAP the above described behavior started.

Reconfiguring the router and all wireless clients for 128 bit WEP
eliminated the dropping connectivty problem. But I'm not very happy
about being forced to used the significantly less secure WEP encryption.

* Continuous stream of 'detected ... network adapter ... connected'
events

On three different wirelss network/system configurations (Dell Inspiron
laptop running WinXP/SP2 with WPC54G adapter communicating with
WAP54G wireless access point; HP Pavilion laptop with Broadcom wireless
adapter communicating with WRT54G broadband route/WAP; and Twinhead
Slimnote laptop running Win2K/SP4 with WPC54G adapter communicating
with WRT54G broadband route/WAP) I get a steady stream of events logged
into my Windows system events log - event logged is "The system detected
that network adapter <wireless adpter driver indentfier> was connected
to the network, and has initiated normal operation over the network
adapter."

These events get logged at seemingly somewhat random intervals -
anywhere from less than a minute to several minutes. While connectivty
appears to be fine, these events clutter and eventually fill the system
event log.

Since I see this behavior on such a diverse range of configurations,
I'm guessing that this is occuring for others as well. Is this so? If
so, anybody figure out how to stop this somewhat annoying behvior?


So that's my story of being on boundaries of the wireless frontier.
Slick technology, but my Linksys deployement experience was less than
exemplary. I do wonder if any of the other vendors (Netgear, D-Link,
et. al.) do a better job of any of this?

Regards,
John Fishbeck

HI

Update your all your foirmware and hopefully that will fix THIS problem.
Yesterday I had a probelm with disconnecting/reconnecting using WAP...it
didn't happen when I used no encryption...The upgrade firmware to the Access
Point (WRT54G) fixed it.

Good luck


encryption. After much teeth gnashing and hair pulling (and I don't
have much hair left to pull, either!), I discovered that my son's HP
Pavilion laptop with built-in Broadcom wireless adapter and running
WinXP/SP2 would continuously disconnect/re-connect when the router and
client were configured for WAP.