previous 802.11 thread (prism2 + managed mode, success with dlink)

[Damien Elmes]

Michael Still <mikal at stillhq.com> writes:

> On Sat, 25 May 2002, Damien Elmes wrote:
>
>> I ended up springing for two d-link cards, both from Harris Technology in
>> Sydney. (www.ht.com.au). My laptop uses a DWL-650
>> (http://dlink.com.au/products/wireless/dwl650/) which seem to be a pretty good
>> deal at $160 a piece. For the desktop end, I got one of the integrated PCI
>> solutions (rather than a pcmcia->pci bridge, and associated card).
>> http://dlink.com.au/products/wireless/dwl520/ is the product I chose. At $200,
>> it was cheaper than a combo solution, and the detachable antenna meant I could
>> expand range if necessary.
>
> This is exactly the solution I bought, from the same place... 

Great minds think alike (or we're both just cheap bastards ;-)

> Well, my 520 is in a little brick room out the back of the house (the
> computer room, and I have connectivity all through the house... I haven't
> tested for speed, because who cares with telnet?

I like to be able to stream music / videos / etc from another machine and make
the most of a network filesystem. I also run apps directly off other machines
via a tunneled X connection or similar. I'd really like to detach X programs
from an existing server and start running them on a new one, but to do that
i'd need to use xmove or similar, and running all my local apps through a
proxy isn't an appealing thought.

>> desktop PCI card as an access point, as I'd like to be able to have access to
>> link quality statistics and the like. There's a page floating around on the
>> internet, at http://www.cafwap.net/prism2ap/, which outlines the process
>> needed to turn a prism2 based card into an AP. Has anyone followed these
>> instructions / done something similar? I'm wondering how to obtain the
>> firmware from Intersil.
>
> There is a page on my site (http://www.stillhq.com), which outlines my
> experience with this process... Basically, it just works.

Ahh, that's neat. I saw the 'warning, this is for testing purposes', and was a
bit warned off - but it appears the driver functions quite well. Thanks for
that - I've now got a linux box for an access point.

What driver do you use for the PCMCIA end? I'm using the linux-wlan-ng drivers
at the moment, as the kernel pcmcia hermes driver seems to drop to about 30k/s
from 550+k/s after stopping and starting a few transfers.

-- 
Damien Elmes