BSD Wireless

[Luke Kearney]

On Fri, 22 Oct 2004 22:08:05 -0500
Chris <racerx at makeworld.com> spake thus:

> On Friday 22 October 2004 10:03 pm, Andrew L. Gould wrote:
> > 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.)
> 
> I prefer NetGear - woiks well for me...

The whole plan is a bit more complicated by the fact that much of the
_known to be supported_ hardware is not available in Japan or sold under
different model numbers.  One end of the link will be FBSD the other a
linux machine so two cards are needed and these must be supported by the
respective OS'es. After googling for hours on this the only common
thread I can get is that these orinoco or prism chipsets seem to be well
supported but there is very little information on the vendors websites
to indicate which product uses which chipset. The other thread was that
the atheros chipset seemed to be well regarded but before heading off to
buy some kit I was *hoping* to hear from someone else on list who has
used the elecom cards (specifically the LD-WL5411A/B ) or anything else
based on the AR5001X+ chipset and had success with it. 

Thanks

LukeK

-- 
Luke Kearney <lukek at meibin.net>