Wi-fi the easy way

I've got a home network running the easy way - I have a combined adsl
modem/switch/router and used cat5 cabling. Then I wanted to add wifi.

I have bought a couple of Asus WL330g devices from an online retailer
in the UK, for hardly any money. They come with a cable to let you
nick 5V from a USB port, and a short cat5 cable. They auto-configure
depending what you plug them into, rather than requiring crossover cat
5 jumpers.

They have a switch on the bottom to select either access point or
ethernet adaptor mode. I have on on the router set as an AP, and the
other on the workstation in ethernet adaptor mode.

The ethernet adaptor mode is poorly documented. It has a default IP of
192.168.1.1 so you need to set your ethernet port to a suitable
matching subnet and configure it with a browser - selecting the AP and
entering the wep code, for example. But once it has connected to the
AP it goes into transparent mode, and stops having an IP address of its
own - subsequent attempts to connect to .1.1 are passed through to your
network. That can get very confusing, as you don't appear to be able
to configure it. It is possible to press the reset button to get it to
disconnect and go back to interactive mode.

My home network is 10.0.0.0/24 and the workstation normally uses dhcp,
so I added a second IP to the interface with ifconfig eth0
192.168.1.254 add which creates eth0:1 so I could access the WL330g
before it connected to the AP, after which the original eth0 got it's
dhcp address and dns pointers, and we were off.

Once a essid is saved in the device along with it's wep key it appears
to stay there despite power downs, so now it just all sort of works on
powerup.

If I was travelling I could add additional AP essid data, and select
them by toggling with the reset button so I would not need a driver
every time.

The device is small, as small as a pack of cards, and comes with a
zipped carrying case for the cables and power pack too. It comes with
a windoze utility that will locate the devices either by mac address or
over the air, but that is not available for linux.

Good value for money - less than 40 quid eaach. Not the best device -
the .g version has lost the ability to be a repeater - but simple and
straightforward. No buggering about with wifi chip sets and drivers in
linux. [1]

Recommended and simple

[1] not that I havn't had huge success with wifi in my dell laptop -
mandrake 10.1 found and installed it without a hitch, which is a damn
sight better than the situation under w2k which required 3 separate
downloads from the dell site to be installed in sequence - and this for
a card supplied built in by Dell.



robertharvey@my-deja.com