Wireless router?

[Corey Chandler]

Roger Olofsson wrote:
>
>
> Nerius Landys skrev:
>> I have a PC with FreeBSD set up as a router (NAT). The PC has several
>> network cards and I'm grouping the internal-facing network cards as a
>> bridge (promiscuous mode for the interfaces).  Everything works well.
>>
>> Now I'd like to extend my wired network to include wireless.  I really
>> have no experience with wireless networks.  I have a couple of
>> computers that are wireless-ready (a laptop and a Playstation 3 that I
>> won in a raffle).  Is it possible to somehow add some hardware to my
>> FreeBSD router PC to make it into a wireless router?  What kind of
>> hardware would I install?  What is it called?  The PC only has PCI
>> slots, can you recommend a brand and model of "wireless server
>> equiptment" if such a thing exists?  Would a normal wireless card
>> suffice?  What model should I get?  I would prefer to set up static
>> internal IPs for my wireless network at home, would this be possible?
>> Or is DHCP the way to go (I hesitate at the thought of configuring a
>> DHCP server).
>>
>> Another way to go is to hook up a standalone wireless router appliance
>> to my FreeBSD machine's network interface (one of the interfaces).  I
>> already have such a device, I think it's made by Linksys.  But then, I
>> would be NAT'ing both through the FreeBSD machine and through the
>> wireless router.  So it would be a double-NAT so to speak.  Is there
>> anything wrong with that approach?
>>
>> So in a nutshell, I have a wired FreeBSD router with multiple ethernet
>> jacks at home, and I want to extend it to include wireless network.
>> Any suggestions would be appreciated.  Thanks.
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>
> Hello Nerius,
>
> I simply bought a standard wireless router, turned off all services in 
> it except the access list and plugged it in the LAN. The access list 
> filters on mac addresses and that level of security is fine where I live.
>
> The wireless router does have firewall, dhcp, port triggering and such 
> but I disabled all of those since my FreeBSDs do all of that already.
>
> The wireless router has one port for internet and four ports as a 
> normal switch, I don't use the internet port. I just plug in the 
> ethernet cable in the switch part as uplink.
>
> I considered having a wifi nic as accesspoint in the FreeBSD main 
> router, however, it was better for me to be able to place the wifi 
> router for optimal range of the wifi. Turned out that the centre point 
> for wifi is not the same as where the main router is....
>
> Greetings
>
> /Roger
>
>

This is definitely the route I'd go.  I'm a BIG fan of the Buffalo 
wireless access points if they've re-entered the channel near you (a 
patent troll prevented their sale for the last 18 months, but that court 
case was just overturned), as they support DD-WRT.  Failing that, the 
Linksys WRT54GL isn't a half bad unit.

Custom firmware (dd-wrt, OpenWRT, Tomato) also give you a lot finer 
grained control over what happens on the AP.

-- CJC