 | RE:Cheapest way to wirelessly network an Epod (modified 0 times) | eggplant | |
| The wavelan 2mb cards are 802.11 compliant. They don't encrypt, but it was recently announced that wireless encryption is actually pretty easy to crack, so I don't see it as a great loss. Also, if you are using them with Terminal Services, 2mb will probably be enough -- with TS, you are only using the pod as a dumb terminal to your PC. The actual net (surfing) traffic never gets to the pod, just screen shots.
As for peer-to-peer (also called ad-hoc mode), this is when wireless cards talk directly to each other, as opposed to talking to an access point. It is sort of like CB radio -- you get all the cards to talk on the same channel, and then everyone hears everyone's packets, just as if they were on a wired section of ethernet. The configuration is independent of your TCP/IP settings -- it is simply another way for the cards to talk to each other. I have five machines in my house (one win95 box, 1 win98, 2 win2k server, and the epod) and they all talk to each other via peer-to-peer without a problem. I have one of the w2k boxes set up as a DHCP server, so all the other machines get their IP addresses from it, and use it as the gateway to the soon-to-be-installed satellite IP service. The gateway server is also the TS host, so the pod appears to be a remote desktop of that machine. This makes setting up wireless even easier, since it is the "server". I simply carry the epod to the machine I'm trying to configure and it's like having the server machine right there.
And to answer the interoperability question -- if all your wireless gear is from one vendor (or better yet is all identical), then you really don't need to worry about this. You can make different cards talk to each other, but why bother? | |
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