[clug] PCI wireless cards

[Damien Elmes]

Michael Still <mikal at stillhq.com> writes:

>> * I'm particularly interested in cards that work with a driver that
>>   ships with a standard (2.6) kernel.
>
> I believe hostap, which is what I use, is shipping with 2.6 RSN.

I had big problems with hostap and wlan-ng on 2.4. They were
reasonably reliable (didn't require restarting every day), but they
seemed very unstable in the face of heavy IDE disk activity. With
hostap on the pci card, my laptop's card would even temporarily
disassociate during an updatedb on the desktop box. With wlan-ng, it
would just drop pretty much all packets until things died down.

I don't think I ever tried the orinoco drivers for the PCI side on
2.4. Using 2.6 on the desktop, with the latest alpha orinoco drivers
(the 2.6 shipping ones seemed to crash the machine, though that may
have been a freak occurance) has been working beautifully, though. I'd
been using CIPE previously, which was holding off an upgrade to 2.6
(not ported properly), but Mark pointed out openvpn, which was an
all-round better solution anyway.

> Wow! I paid $250 about two years ago.

Me too. But it was bound to happen.

Cheers,
-- 
Damien Elmes