Topic: wireless AP - (cards that work with e-smith)

[Steve]

Those of you who have setup e-smith as a wireless AP, what card did you use?  I have a Cyrix 233 mhz machine that is running e-smith that I would like to use as a wireless AP in my house.  (I know some are only pci 2.2 compatible, so I'm not sure if my MB is compatible since it is a few years old).  Could you please list your experiences and what works.

Thanks!

Steve

[Duncan]

I wont be able to respond to this until Thurs (going away) but i have the Zoom 4105  and the dlink 520 cards working under SME.

Both are using the Linux wlan drivers (prism2). You need to mess abit with the template system to get them to play properly.

I havnt managed to get the Zoom working under 5.6 yet. It uses the yenta socket (within the kernel) which is causing some problems but the dlink works fine.

Regards Duncan

[Ed Form]

Steve wrote:
>
> Those of you who have setup e-smith as a wireless AP, what
> card did you use?  I have a Cyrix 233 mhz machine that is
> running e-smith that I would like to use as a wireless AP in
> my house.  (I know some are only pci 2.2 compatible, so I'm
> not sure if my MB is compatible since it is a few years
> old).  Could you please list your experiences and what works.

Why would you want to go to all the trouble of getting a radio card to work in an SME server? Standard radio base stations have at least one RJ45 socket. Just fit a cheap network card in the SME server, cable a standard radio base station to it and radio link all the other stations.

Ed Form

[Steve]

Duncan,
  I look forward to hearing of your experiences.  If you want, you can email me your experience (raceboatok_at_netzero.net).  If you are using any laptops, I wouldn't mind your comments/suggestions for PCMCIA cards since I will also need those for my two laptops that will be used with the e-smith AP.

Thanks,

Steve



Ed,
  I want to eventually implement IPSEC, 3DES, or some other strong encryption tunnels.  WEP is nearly worthless for now. Algorithms to crack new encryption will only be a matter of time.  There is no such thing as 'secure', but 'how long' it takes for someone to decrypt your information.  IPSec should take longer to decrypt than WEP.  Also, it is usually cheaper to just buy a PCI card than a stand-alone AP.  In addition, I'll be able to fine tune my security better using IPtables.

  I don't mean to sound negative as I really do appreciate all comments by everyone!

Thanks,

Steve

[Charlie Brady]

Steve wrote:

>   I want to eventually implement IPSEC, 3DES, or some other
> strong encryption tunnels.  WEP is nearly worthless for now.
> Algorithms to crack new encryption will only be a matter of
> time.  There is no such thing as 'secure', but 'how long' it
> takes for someone to decrypt your information.  IPSec should
> take longer to decrypt than WEP.  Also, it is usually cheaper
> to just buy a PCI card than a stand-alone AP.  In addition,
> I'll be able to fine tune my security better using IPtables.

All pretty much the answers I would give, Steve. I'll be interested to see how you get on. Please write up a howto when you are done. If you have any technical questions, I'd suggest you ask them on the devinfo list.

Regards

Charlie

[Ed Form]

Steve wrote:

>   I want to eventually implement IPSEC, 3DES, or some other
> strong encryption tunnels.  WEP is nearly worthless for now.
> Algorithms to crack new encryption will only be a matter of
> time.  There is no such thing as 'secure', but 'how long' it
> takes for someone to decrypt your information.  IPSec should
> take longer to decrypt than WEP.  Also, it is usually cheaper
> to just buy a PCI card than a stand-alone AP.  In addition,
> I'll be able to fine tune my security better using IPtables.
>
>   I don't mean to sound negative as I really do appreciate
> all comments by everyone!

I still don't understand the problem. Two NICs in the SME server, one connected to a radio base station and the other connected to a broadband modem would allow all those things.

The cost thing is another matter, but a 54Mbit base station is only 115 UK Pounds so it's no real biggie, and it would do all the things you want on the day it was delivered.

Ed Form

[Ed Form]

I forgot to add...

WEP is still involved and still vunerable. I could stand outside your door with a portable and pick up your radio-link data stream. If 128bit WEP is easy to crack your security is toast anyway.

Ed Form

[Ed Form]

I forgot to add...

WEP is still involved and still vunerable. I could stand outside your door with a portable and pick up your radio-link data stream. If 128bit WEP is easy to crack your security is toast anyway.

Ed Form

[JeffC]

Regardless of the security issues, there may be a very easy way to add wireless capabilities to an SME box.

SMC has a new adapter out that plugs into ANY nic and turns it into a wireless device.

The adapter is an SMC2670W is is a cheap alternative to a hell of a lot of fiddling with drivers.  Currently only works at 11 meg which means it is viable as the external interface.

Plug it in and you are on your wireless net.

-jeff

[Bill Talcott]

JeffC wrote:
>
> Regardless of the security issues, there may be a very easy
> way to add wireless capabilities to an SME box.
>
> SMC has a new adapter out that plugs into ANY nic and turns
> it into a wireless device.
>
> The adapter is an SMC2670W is is a cheap alternative to a
> hell of a lot of fiddling with drivers.  Currently only works
> at 11 meg which means it is viable as the external interface.
>
> Plug it in and you are on your wireless net.
>
> -jeff

This is similar to the Linksys WET11. I'm not sure about the SMC, but with the Linksys, it allows a wired device access to a wireless network, but it will NOT act as an access point.

[JeffC]

Bill,

You are correct.  It is not a WAP.

I'm not sure I understand the difficulty here.

Simply purchase any one of the WAP units that has a switch incorporated, assign it a fixed IP, plug in your SME box internal interface, divide up the DHCP scopes to whatever is required for hard-wired and wireless and off you go.

Since you would have to buy an internal card, there seems (to me anyway) that there is no real advantage in going through this exercise.

-jeff

[Bill Talcott]

I agree that right now the easiest way is probably just to use a regular NIC and a wireless AP, but it would be nice to have WiFi support for SME. There are places offering wireless broadband now, and I always prefer less hardware if possible.

[Duncan]

Sorry for not getting back to you. Inundated with blown Telephone systems since I have been back (lightning strikes).

Do you still want to go thru this.

Basically what i did was set up a wireless card as a third interface and run Freeswan thru it (a year ago, so I have forgotten how). Now i have a e-smith machine dedicated to access a Public wireless lan (no internet access, just for playing games and vpn access to the business for my partners) and another machine to access the internet (Marconi radio system).

I have never set anything up as an access point, always adhoc and i dont run any local machines via wireless (all copper) but the zoom cards seem to be well priced and work well enough for our external access. I agree that the access point road is probably the easier option, but i had some pci and pcmcia cards lying around and decided to use them.

Let me know

Duncan

[bjohns]

I've played with Cisco Airo PCI340, LMC342 and LMC352 adaptors under E-Smith. They all work quite well as clients. I've been meaning to play with the access point side of things, I might just do that now.

I've got a really dodgy hack howto for using them under e-smith at
http://www.naturalnetworks.net/mainPub/index_html?key=1043806691.83

Will add an accesspoint howto when I find out how well it works with cisco gear (I'm not interested in any other wireless equipment). Rumour has it that cisco adaptors don't like acting like an AP...

[Doug Necessary]

John great information.  I have a wireless isp and have been trying to figure this out for months off and on.  I have the pci350 cisco card in another machine just to be a router.  Anyway it is a pci card and I was woundering if I need to turn on the pci functions to make it work.  I has a pcmcia card mounted on it but it seems to treat it as pci in windoz.  

All I have to set on my card now is the ssid.  I assume that I can put that in /etc/pcmcia/network but not sure if that is correct.  I could use your first method I'm sure.  Thanks for all the info and the research.  Maybe I can finally get down to one box and one firewall.