i was going to post an interesting backlog of 802.11 articles, but it appears that most of them have turned up on slashdot, but that’s not going to stop me from throwing them in the annotated bookmark bin.
cringely
illustrates how to roll your
own dsl which is where my eyes were drawn to the following drool
inducing blurb:
“Linksys has come out with a firmware upgrade for its WAP 11 Wireless
Access point that allows two of them to function as Ethernet-to-Ethernet
bridges. The firmware is free on the Linksys Website . The firmware also
allows use of Ethernet MAC address access lists to restrict connections
to a list that is uploaded into flash ROM. That way it is much harder
for people to just cruise down your street with a notebook computer,
surfing on your bandwidth and stealing your files.“The street price of these Linksys boxes is now down around $250, which
is half the price of the next cheapest bridge, from SMC.”
hmmmm. whets the appetite. i had to look no further than Bridging 802.11 Networks with Linksys
to increase the drool, which was inspired by an excellent thread on the Bay Area Wireless User Group’s (BAWUG). one post in particular illustrates the kind of throughput and range you might be able to expect with a little tweaking:
“I have two 4-mile paths using WAP11’s and they are both running
flawlessly. Throughput is at least 2 Mbps.I am using Andrew 24 dBi parabolic antennas on one path and Cal-Amp
21 dBi parabolic antennas on the other. Performance seems to be
about the same.”“The Andrew antennas are available from Tessco, Inc. ph: 800-508-5444
Andrew 2.4 GHz parabolic antennas SKU# 40735. Cost about $85 each.”
bummed because you just bought a netgear access point? there’s at least anectdotal evidence that the software upgrade will work on other
systems:
“I’ve just used the Linksys firmware to upgrade
my netgear me102 access point and used the Linksys
SMNP utility to configure it.In fact I think it should work on any PRISIM chip
based 802.11b access point.One thing I noticed though. After upgrading the firmware I had to unplug
the ME102 and plug it back in brfore I could access it again.”
me thinks that my search for an access point has ended.