Wireless Networking - a short story
I thought I'd take the opportunity, while working at home, to enjoy the spell of fine weather I was anticipating. More of the waether later, but I decided to fork out on some wireless gear to do it.
A quick word about the pre-wireless setup. I have a 3Com ISDN TA which has 4 10Mb Ethernet ports, and the home PC and laptop plug into there. It's a basic router, so if any PC connected tries to send a packet to the outside world it brings the ISDN up. This is ideal as it's intelligent enough to bring the line up and down as needed, and bring the 2nd channel in if I'm downloading. Plus it's a DHCP server as well.
Of course, I'm limited to staying in the office if I'm working from home as this is where the ISDN TA is. And yes, I didn't want the hassle of 30m flyleads.
I did some research on wireless access points and NIC cards, and decided on a ZoomAir 4165. This allows various methods of connecting to the internet and allows direct connection to an existing LAN. I also ordered a ZoomAir PCMCIA wireless card. Total cost - just short of £300 from Inmac.
So, ordered Friday pm, arrived Monday 9:30am, installed and working by 10:30 - but how ?
Having read the documentation, it turns out the access point has a default IP address of 192.168.123.234 - my network is 192.168.1.0 ( the TA does NAT ).
Plugged the access point in to the TA, plugged NIC into laptop, loaded drivers for the NIC, rebooted, gave NIC static IP address. Changed IP address of access point to 192.168.1.253, disabled its DHCP server, told it NOT to try connecting to the internet but just work as an access point.
Reset the wireless NIC to get a DHCP address, and after a bit of trouble getting an IP address, I reset both the access point and the TA - bingo.
So if I;m using the laptop, when I fire it up the NIC talks to the access point, using it as a bridge. The TA issues an IP address, and acts as the default router. Any traffic not destined for the local network ( which at the moment consists of a laptop, PC, TA and a Nokia IP120 router/firewall ) goes over ISDN to work's RAS.
So, I can now PPRuNe, check work mail, private email, from anywhere in the house. Signal strength goes down a bit in the dining room, but 100% in the room directly below. Works a treat, saves annoying the missus by tapping away in the office, which is right next to the bedroom. Which at 5am this morning was a real treat.
And why am I not typing this from the laptop, downstairs, without power cable and Ethernet lead ? Because the weather is crap, and looks like it intends to stay that way so I'm up in the office. Ah well.