On Sat, 2002-03-16 at 16:34, Kent West wrote: > I've got two Debian (Sid) boxes in different parts of the house. Can I > put in a wireless NIC into each one of them, and them talk to each > other, or must I have a Wireless Access Point as an intermediary?
You don't need no stinkin' WAP. ;) I've done exactly this -- Setup a Ad-Hoc wireless network between a server and my laptop (Both Debian Woody). It works well. > Also, as long as I'm on the subject. Typically I'd buy some name brand > I'm more familiar with, like D-Link or Netgear, but the Siemens box > specifically mentions that Linux is a compatible OS. For that reason, > I'd like to throw my money toward Siemens. Any technical reasons not to? I'm using Orinoco Silver (56bit WEP) PCMCIA cards with a PCI->PCMCIA converter in the server. They weren't terribly expensive ($70) and have some features that aren't present on many other wireless cards, including a spot to plug in an external antenna. pcmcia_cs recognized everything from the start, using the orinoco_cs module. All I had to do what set the IPs, routes, and change the mode on the wireless cards to Ad-Hoc with iwconfig. It was very simple. :) I've switched to Orinoco's official driver after having some intermittent dropped connections with orinoco_cs, they appear to work better. Driver support for the Orinoco cards in Linux is excellent. :) > And one more: why can't I find a PCI wireless NIC, instead of a PCI > wireless NIC adapter plus a wireless PCMCIA NIC? To me, that seems > stupid. (But then, someone mentioned that the Apple wireless Airport > basestation does the same thing; puts a wireless PCMCIA nic in an adapter.) I believe the real PCI wireless cards use a slightly different chipset, which may not be fully supported yet. I could be totally wrong though.
