Access Point - PCI or standalone ?

[DaveQB]

Moving house soon [5 weeks] and will be setting up wireless access to the LAN i'll set up there [bigger house with no easy way to cable all area's]

I have never player with Wireless before. Is it better to get a standalone Wireless router/access point or use a PCI wireless card and your Linux server as the access point ?

Any other sugestions appreciated.

[Wally Balljacker]

I'd just get one of those little Linksys or D-Link boxes. For the most part they're plug and play. They also require less power, and you don't need to run your Linux box 24/7 in order to supply wireless.

[DaveQB]

Ok, the running 24/7 doesn't apply as I run 2 servers now 24/7 and have ran at least 1 24/7 server for 5 years now [email, http, ssh access, etc etc]

So other then that, any compelling reasons to use a standalone ?

[Wally Balljacker]

Ok, the running 24/7 doesn't apply as I run 2 servers now 24/7 and have ran at least 1 24/7 server for 5 years now [email, http, ssh access, etc etc]

So other then that, any compelling reasons to use a standalone ?

An off-the-shelf Linksys router would be easier to setup. But if you've got servers running already, you could go the geeky route, and configure a pretty kick ass router/firewall.

[snarkout]

It depends on how geeky you want to get, but I generally just use component stuff. I've never been happy with any of the linux utils to build your own firewall, really, but it's been a few years since I've messed with any of that stuff. The wrt54g linux projects have come a long, long way in the past few years - you might check them out -- IIRC the most mature/popular at this point is openwrt, but there are several out there.

[chuck]

Moving house soon [5 weeks] and will be setting up wireless access to the LAN i'll set up there [bigger house with no easy way to cable all area's]

I have never player with Wireless before. Is it better to get a standalone Wireless router/access point or use a PCI wireless card and your Linux server as the access point ?

Any other sugestions appreciated.

Well I would recommend the wireless router/ap option. The main reason is if you find your house needs bigger/better antennas it's easy enough to upgrade them. I like the (off memory here) Linksys SRX-400 device. Really boosted the signal converage at my place.

As for the Linux/PCIcard option my thinking is it gets +100 for geek factor but -250 for practicality.

And remember that the higher you can place this the better it is for coverage.

In my place we have the main AP in the basement and works well enough for in house coverage. In the office and living room I have a couple of cheap ($10-$15 after rebate from CompUSA) zyzel wireless APs that act as clients for multiple wired devices including my mythbox, laser printer, and pc's that are in the office without wireless cards. So instead of spending ~$25 on each wireless card for 5 devices I spent $25 for two wireless routers w/ 4port switchs and a hub that i had from years ago.

As far as other suggestions go try to get your servers wired to the area that you're primarily working from. IE if you wire the office together as i described with a wireless link to the main AP, wire your servers in the office if you need maximum bandwith for data moves.

[DaveQB]

Thanks guys.

So it seems I better start researching the software packages out there to manage the Wireless AP on a Linux box to see if its what I need/want.