BSD Wireless

[Andrew L. Gould]

On Friday 22 October 2004 08:21 pm, Chris wrote:
> On Friday 22 October 2004 08:17 pm, Luke Kearney wrote:
> > Hi List,
> > I am looking to purchase a wireless PCI card for a new machine here
> > at my home. I was wondering if anyone can share sucess or horror
> > stories about the Elecom range of products. I am wanting to use one
> > machine as the access point and one machine as the client. I wasn't
> > planing to deploy a hardware access point though if the consensus
> > is that a hardware access point is the better way to go I could
> > certainly start looking at this.
> >
> > Thanks
>
> Just read what hardware is supported to date, buy it, then you can't
> go wrong. Pretty easy, aye?

Sadly, no.  Vendor's have changed chipsets without changing model 
numbers or documenting the chipsets used on retail boxes.  Further, 
many of the pci cards that are documented as being compatible with 
FreeBSD are no longer easy to find.

The advantages of a hardware access point include:

1. Access and firewall configuration are done easily via a web browser.
2. They are OS-neutral.

For anyone running FreeBSD 5* who needs a new wireless card (pci or 
pccard), I would suggest looking at the D-Link products that use the 
Atheros chipset.  D-Link is displaying the Atheros logo on the retail 
boxes, which lowers the risk of a bad purchasing decision.

(I'm not an advocate for D-Link or Atheros; but I am in favor of more 
useful information on retail boxes.)

Best of luck,

Andrew Gould