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Hardware

Lucent to Offer Cheap Wavelan Cards 231

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i've-got-no-wires-to-hold-me-down dept.
Glarvat the Hepcat writes, "Lucent is preparing to sell new 11 Mbps cards at costs to rival some of the 2 Mbps cards such as WebGear. They also are supposed to be also to handle distances of up to 1500 feet. Released to select retailers by late March. " Recently we ordered a few Lucent cards at the Geek Compound to test them out. The impressive thing about these things is that Wavelan has Linux drivers: Source code and all. How many vendors have tarballs on their sites? The hardware gateways are fairly expensive, but simply setting them up peer to peer and using IP Masqing works pretty well. I haven't tested the range but they quite quick.
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Lucent to Offer Cheap Wavelan Cards More

Lucent to Offer Cheap Wavelan Cards

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  • Price (Score:2)

    by RaZ0r ( 145723 )
    "The list price of the ORINOCO PC Card is $179; the PCI and ISA adapter are $69 each, and the RG-1000 Residential Gateway is $349." The price doesn't seem too bad at all.


    Lets stop praying for someone to save us and save ourselves. ~KMFDM
  • How well would these work in conjunction with a USB network? Don't USB networks operate at 11MBps? (Or is it 12?)

    kwsNI
  • Very interesting. I'm getting my ADSL connection installed tomorrow, with the box being downstairs and the computer being 3 flights away from it I'm going to run into a bit of trouble. The ADSL box works a little like an Ascend pipeline, from what I gather, so my machine thinks it's wired to the network and knows nothing about ADSL whatsoever - I could put my FreeBSD box downstairs and IP MASQ over wireless upstairs. A bit fo a waste of a computer in the porch, though. Does anyone know if it's at all possible using something similar to this kind of kit to have a wireless link to a network port in the wall without havign a second comptuer to route through? In other words, trying to replace the traditional cable with a wireless link? Dave.
  • http://www.sflan.com/

    Also, the @stake folks doing Guerilla Networking.

    Also, the Midcoast (Maine) Internet folks, although they've standardized on Breezecom.
    -russ
  • Does anyone know if these things are available outside the US (e.g., .nl) for reasonable prices? Are the US units compatible with the ones sold in Europe or do they operate in a different frequency band (like cell phones)?
    --

  • There are two versions of the drivers (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The source they released for linux does not contain things such as power optimizations. There is an object code version too though.
  • With the mass adoption of Bluetooth, Lucent has to do something to maintain market share. As well, rumor has it that a Bluetooth wireless network will knock out an 802.11 network. Can anyone confirm this rumour?
  • We just setup a wirless network to connect some of the small group housing here at the College. We're using the Lucent WaveLan Turbo Silver 11Mbs cards in P100 linux routers and they work great! It was a relatively quick and easy setup, I just wish I could figure out how to get mrouted (multicast routing) working so the students can log into the Netware servers. Anyone have any ideas (the HOWTOs are no help so don't point me there)?

    As a side note, I will be getting one of these nice 11 meg links to my house shortly. :) And you guys thought DSL was nice, heh!
  • I've worked with some 802.11, and it's interesting how much fun you can have with a low wattage, high frequency device. If you can find a way to hack the antenna on the device so that you can connect a higher gain antenna, you can get much greater distance out of the device, albeit much more directionally biased. I'd be interested to see if these cards can handle something like a 13-23dBi antenna, cause you could get some *mad* distances with that, something on the order of a few miles. I've seen it done with the more expensive units - I'd buy these cards if they could do the same.
  • Maybe wireless networking will become a reality.

  • Long distance too... (Score:3)

    by layer1 ( 75748 ) on Monday February 28, 2000 @05:03AM (#1240845)
    If this is the same WaveLan from AT&T I used a number of years ago (and it probably is)...

    It is very cool, You can hook up high-gain directional antennas to the bridges and get upto a 5 mile (I got 1.8 mi. easily) point-to-point wireless link. Might want to check if the frequency if FCC OK first though - I worked for the USAF, so it didn't matter to me &lt grin &gt.

  • Specifications [wavelan.com] do not mention Linux support. Several other OSes are listed...although one is "Novel" and the "Windows CE" product no longer uses that name.
  • The wavelan drivers are now currently in the standard pcmcia-cs distribution too. And from my experience they work just as well as the ones from Lucent.

  • Health Side Effects???? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I need to get my home computers networked and I am a little worried about bombarding my house w. radio waves 24/7.

    Between my cordless phones and a wavelan network, I am thinking about subjecting my family to a very large dose of 2.4Ghz.

    Can anyone give my pointers to studies showing that 2.4Ghz transmiters are completely harmless to people (esp pregnant women and small children) cats, fish and plants????

    Thanks!

    trikster2@hotmail.com
  • It should be pointed out that the desktop PC user will need to buy both the PC Card _and_ the PCI / ISA adapter:

    The ISA/PCI adapter is delivered as a sole adapter; the PC card, which completes the solution, has to be ordered as a separate item.

    So that comes to around $250 per machine, plus the gateway. A little rich for my blood still....

  • There is the BreezeCom [breezecom.com] unit, but it is only 3 Mbps.

  • Huh? (Score:3)

    by Dodger_ ( 51556 ) on Monday February 28, 2000 @05:06AM (#1240852) Homepage
    I don't see this as much more than a re-introduction than their Bronze line of Wavelan cards. The announcement doesn't mention anything about encryption and the price isn't even that good. At CDW you can pick up a Wavelan Gold [cdw.com] PCMCIA card for $190 and you get 128 bit hardware encryption. The Bronze [cdw.com](no encryption), is only $128, much cheaper than their "intro" price of $179 for PC cards. The only good thing I see of this is that they are finally releasing their PCI cards, as I can't seem to find them anywhere. I'll definately be picking some of these up for my Workpad z50.

  • Aironet at Tcl/Tk Conference (Score:3)

    by Col. Klink (retired) ( 11632 ) on Monday February 28, 2000 @05:07AM (#1240853)
    At the Tcl/Tk Conference in Austin (Feb 13-18), Usenix provided a free Aironet wireless network. They had about 100 (I don't think they ran out) 11Mb PCMCIA cards that you could check out. You gave them your credit card and if you didn't return them, they would charge you $395. They provided drivers for Windows, Linux, BSD and Mac.

    They worked well when they worked, but they had a pretty limited range. They didn't work, for example, at the podium and thus no presenters were able to do any "real" demonstrations.

    This was the first time Usenix tried offering such a service, so it's understandable that it wasn't perfect. I hope they continue to offer this service, but don't think they're close to eliminating traditional network services just yet.

    PS: The ISP was jump.net.
  • I'm wondering if it's strictly necessary to buy one of the base stations if I already have a "router" machine? From what I can garner from the specs on the cards, it should work but I'm not sure if there is some subtle requirement for the base station.
  • Of course you need to buy the PCI/ISA adapter and the PC card. I'm not sure what the purpose of the Gateway is, because I know I could just use sygate with the PCI/ISA adapter to gain internet access on any lan. If anybody would like to explain the purpose of the gateway, please go ahead and explain it for me:)


    Lets stop praying for someone to save us and save ourselves. ~KMFDM
  • USB runs at 1.5 to 12.0Mbps.. It'll hopefully get faster over time, but probably won't ever be comparable to firewire. Wireless will certainly take over your peripheral devices sometime this decade. :)

    - EraseMe
  • What's with all the hullaballoo here? We have these at work (for a few months now), not the inexpensive one's listed here, but 11 mbs nonetheless, and we RARELY, no, more like NEVER get an 11mbs connection. On a good day we get 4, but more often than not, 2. Not trying to start a flame war, just my $.02

  • Lucent driver is *not* a source driver (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 28, 2000 @05:14AM (#1240861)
    Unfortunately the Lucent drivers are binary only.

    The "source" tarball contains a skeleton C code which links against a binary module to do the actual work.

    So, you get all the great disadvantages of binary drivers: x86 only, no support for Linux 2.3 or BSD, etc, etc...

    The older generation of WaveLan cards have been supported by a truly open source driver for years now

  • "but they quite quick. " (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Have you been taking English lessons from Tarzan?

    :-)

  • Bluetooth was not meant for short-haul peer to peer lans. It was designed to go short distances (~10ft or so) for interconnecting personal computing devices. It will link things like PDAs, cellphones, digital cameras, and other personal gadgets. Think of it like IrDA but without the Ir.

  • Re:Long distance too... (Score:3)

    by XenoWolf ( 6057 ) on Monday February 28, 2000 @05:16AM (#1240864) Homepage
    Actually, As I mentioned in my posting above, I have worked with 802.11b stuff. I don't know if Wavelan has always been DSSS or if it started out as FHSS, like some Motorola chipset stuff, but it's always been 2.4 GHz and thus easily amplified with common antennae. As far as the FCC is concerned, these devices are of such low wattage that they don't even care. And as far as distance is concerned, I've gotten 15 miles out of a similar device with a 23 dBi antenna at around 7 degrees of coverage. Fairly impressive, IMHO
  • I was wondering ... what the maximum theoretical bandwidth of air?

  • Re:802.11 (Score:5)

    by dattaway ( 3088 ) on Monday February 28, 2000 @05:17AM (#1240866) Homepage Journal
    Here's how to add a highly directional antenna [attaway.org] to a wireless card with no antenna jack, specifically a zoomair card. I have three of them and did this to two of them. Line of sight goes for miles! :)
  • I'm really glad to see this. I'm from southwest Virginia, and our best bet at broadband might be LMDS (Virginia Tech bought the spectum licenses for this end of the state and parts of surrounding states). LMDS (Local Multipoint Distribution Service) uses the 802.11 standard and is really cool. Right now the equipment is really expensive. Of course we need a lot more range but low priced local wirless cards are a good start. Watch out. . . the hillbilies are coming online ;-) (I can say that cause i is one.)
  • The gateway lets you go from the wireless side of your lan to the wired side. Basically a bridge from wireless to wired.

    The company I work for actually sells gateways too www.wilinx.com [wilinx.com]

  • Hardware + tarballs + bootdisks = IOI SCSI (Score:3)

    by morzel ( 62033 ) on Monday February 28, 2000 @05:22AM (#1240870)
    How many vendors have tarballs on their sites?
    IOI SCSI [ioiscsi.com] has not just the source tarballs of the Linux drivers for their SCSI cards, they also provided the necessary bootdisks for a number of distros on the driver CDs which is - as I need not explain - uber cool.

    Their cards are based on the ignitio chipsets, which makes it quite performant and stable under Linux...
    And they've been doing so long before the linux hyped.


    Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.

  • Bay (sorry, Nortel) Networks sell a unit called a BayStack 600. It gives you a small box at the core with a 10bT / 10b2 connection to whatever you want, then you run PCMCIA cards in your remote PCs. There is no need for a PC at the hub, but it may be out of the price range of the average home-user.
  • Well, then. That settles it. It couldn't POSSIBLY work with Linux, right?

    Seriously... it's probably based around the Lucent Wavelan IEEE chipset (what lives in the Apple Airport and others) as that's the 11Mbit chipset that they've been selling. There is already a working driver for these devices.
  • Sorry, but does that surprise you?? On a 'standard' 10Meg Ethernet link, you are very lucky to get as much as 6Meg (and that's as a sole, switched device. On a shared segment, you would also be lucky to get as much as 2Meg to each individual machine.

  • Re:drivers (No, you are wrong) (Score:3)

    by Garfunkel ( 3569 ) <jay.jayandcarissa@com> on Monday February 28, 2000 @05:29AM (#1240874) Homepage
    Well the standard drivers seem to work really well with our 802.11 cards. The 802.11 drivers I think have only been included in the last two releases (3.1.9 and 3.1.10 I think). Please see
    http://www.fasta.fh-dortmund.de/users/andy/wvlan /
    as per the pcmcia-cs documentation.
  • AFAIK the base station is nothing but (this is based on the ones we use at work) a PCMCIA slot attached to an ethernet interface, you actually plug one of the PC cards into the slot - so these would NOT be neccesary for 2 machines to talk to each other if they both had wavelan nics
  • From what I understand, 11 mbs is the maximum rate the cards can transmit at, not the throughput. If there is interference, the cards will select a lower rate automatically (like 5.5, 2 or even 1) to (try to) ensure that the data remains valid. Even so, the management overhead (like acknowledgement packets) are transmitted at only 2 mbs.
  • Thanks for the info....very appreciated.


    Lets stop praying for someone to save us and save ourselves. ~KMFDM

  • 802.11 implementation (Score:5)

    by pouwelse ( 118316 ) on Monday February 28, 2000 @05:38AM (#1240880) Homepage
    The Wavelan is only one of the implementations of the IEEE802.11 [ieee.org] standard and will probably drop further in price. The competition is picking up. Harris annouced a price of $14 for the components of an 11MBps wireless LAN card... [intersil.com]

    Here at our university we measured the range of the Wavelan produkts years ago. This new 11 Mbps still won't cover more then 40 Meters inside a building. Solid walls cannot be penetrated with the signal strength of only 100mW@2.4GHz . When the WaveLANs are used outdoors, the range is increased to 500 meters or more provided there is line of sight. We also tested that a small FM signal can block all the communication of the supposed robust CDMA radio.

    Probably the big break will come from bluetooth [bluetooth.com] this standard is technically superiour to the IEEE commity design. It is cheap enough to be build into laptops, PDAs, mp3 players, etc.

    The Linux driver for the WaveLAN cards are only partly distributed in source code. A binairy exists in the distribution to talk to their MAC chip. They will not disclose the interface to they propierary chipset...

    Just my 5 eurocents...
    Johan.

  • Sooo... why couldn't a linux box do the same thing?

  • Hello,

    I'm thinking about possibly wireless networking a few computers in my house. The trouble is that it is a rather large house with old fashion walls (e.g., thick and plaster) and i'm not too sure how capable these cards are in such an environment. Anyone have experience with this? I'd need to run the main card on my linux box (e.g., need linux support), and, say, 2 PC PCI cards, and one laptop card. What might this cost? What brand would you recommend? I'd like to get atleast 10mbps, if it doesn't cost too much.

    I'd appreciate any advice. Thanks
  • These are LOW-power devices, nothing compared with a normal microwave which operates in the same frequency band (2450Mhz to be exact). (This is why they made this band available for general use anyway)

    Grtz, Jeroen

  • ...not the inexpensive one's listed here...

    I'm really impressed with the grammar in these comments. Not a stray apostrophe in the lot, until I got down to here. Amazing, compared to the Katz article I read the other day. Perhaps technical content attracts technically correct people?

    Anyway, it's not one's, it's ones. Please do better next time.

  • Hi, this is a serious question:

    If I already have a box acting as a (cable modem-) router/firewall/masquing machine and put a PC card into that one, so all the other talk to that as my gateway, why would I need the extra "Residential Gateway" with a $350 price tag? Does it have some extra functionality or is that the price of a box doing what I described? Maybe can it handle masquing the dreaded H323 protocol (Netmeeting et al)??

    Insight would appreciated.

    Roland
  • Since WaveLan cards apply to the IEEE802.11 standard, they also work with Apple's Airport [apple.com] base station.

    This seems like a great option for those home users with both iBook's / Powermacs, and their linux / unix boxes and laptops.

    The cost of the airport is cheaper than the mentioned wavelan base, but I have heard it doesn't work quite as well. Anyways, to each his own.
    Ben Brewer
    brewer@nullified.org & tidepool@suspicious.org

  • The Lucent Wavelan IEEE cards can use the Apple Airport Basestation as their hardware gateway. With an educational institution cost of about $250 it was 1/4th the price of the Lucent basestation.

    It requires a Mac running MacOS 8.6 or higher to initially configure the Airport Basestation, but since I set it to run in bridging mode on startup it has run perfectly without a Mac around.

    At this time, this was the cheapest way to get the Lucent cards on a bridged solution as neither the Lucent [wavelan.com] nor GPL [fh-dortmund.de] driver can currently run the card in promiscuous mode (necessary for the kernel bridging code).

  • Yes, this is one of the things that has been done right. The same frequency band is used across Europe, Japan, and the US -- 2.4Ghz. That's why equipment for the older 900 Mhz band is dying out.
    -russ
  • They're offering 11 Mbps Aironet PCMCIA cards for $139 and PCI cards for $179. Not a bad deal. Does anyone know if the Aironet stuff has Linux drivers?


    I just received my Webgear Aviator 2Mbps cards last week and they work well but 2 Mbps is a little slow for my desktop machines. With 11 Mbps I'm tempted to get rid of all those nasty cables...


    Dell article: http://www1.pcworld.com/pcwtoday/article/0,1510,14 402,00.html

  • >Probably the big break will come from bluetooth this standard is technically superiour to the IEEE commity design.

    Bluetooth is designed for short ranges only. The first devices will have a range of 10 meters, later they will extend the specication to up to 100m for some devices...
  • Do either the binary or sourced drivers do the encryption stuff I see on the Gold card? I've been looking at these cards for a while now, but I can wait a few weeks if they'll lower the prices. :)
  • ok - maybe errrr, i definitely wasn't clear, (apologies for the spare apostophe) BUT - what I meant was we never get a raw connection of 11mbs, apples to apples would be the bs "10mbs" of standard ethernet. You might not get 10mbs of throughput, but you do get a 10mbs connection. We get like 4mbs raw, which might equate to less than 2mbs real throughput. To get 11mbs (raw, for lack of a better term) we practically have to duct tape the wavelan NIC to the access point's antenna (I believe a proper use of an apostophe). Again, trying to be informative, not snooty.

  • URLs (Score:3)

    by Russ Nelson ( 33911 ) <slashdot@russnelson.com> on Monday February 28, 2000 @06:02AM (#1240894) Homepage
    L0pht (@stake)'s wireless network [l0pht.com].

    Midcoast Wireless [midcoast.net]
    -russ

  • I didn't read /. articles more than that main page announcement, and decided to be initiative today. I sometimes tell to Hardware Vendors about that Certification, so they might even notify it's existence.

    And I do this because I like to see more Open Hardware. I like to see the kind of future where every Hardware Vendor must release specs of their product - if they want to get significant market share. That's my share of doing something toward it.

    That's my copy of feedback to that Vendor:

    I read from http://slashdot.org that you have Linux drivers and even Open Sources. Great! I'm not a coder, so I didn't even checked the depht of your hardware documentation, but if there are _all_ information that is needed to program drivers to you products you can get Open Hardware Certification (http://www.openhardware.org), it includes right to be included the Catalog of products with that Certification. There is not many products, but you have possibility to make that certification count.

    I certainly would buy products where drivers are available surely in future. At least by coding (or paying someone else to code) those by self, when using good documentation.

  • The Dutch company No Wires Needed [www.nwn.nl] has some excellent hardware. I belief Compaq is buying their stuff now. At the following site you can find a Linux driver for their Swallow 550. http://www.xs4all.nl/~bvermeul/swallow/ [xs4all.nl]

  • Lucent (Score:1)

    by gUmbi ( 95629 )
    We have the 11mbps cards with outdoor attennas hooking up two buildings about 2000 feet apart. Actual throughput seems to be about 4-5 mbps (with latency in the 3-4ms range). You should see the shielding on the attenna wire running from the roof. About 7/8 inch outside diameter, about 2mm inside diameter.
  • I ordered a Webgear Aviaitor kit last week (backordered from buy.com). As near as I can figure, for around $150 this kit gives you two PCMCIA cards AND two ISA adapters that can be used with these PCMCIA cards to put them in a desktop. They run at 2MByte (not MBit) per second. Extra cards for new "nodes" run around $75 each.

    This is much slower then the cards announced here, but you can do an awfull lot with 2MB per second, and this $150 price will be darn hard to beat.

    My current plan is to take an old 486 laptop with only 8MB ram and small hard drive and install a Linux configuration that includes only kernal, networking, and an X server.

    The window manager (Gnome/Enlightenment) and all my applications will then run on my server in the basement, with the display pointed to the laptop. As a side note, this type of configuration is supported by default by Linux, but is at best a terrible kludge with winXX.

    This will make the laptop a thin client that can sit on the kitchen table, or roam around the house, but with the full power of my server at my fingertips.

    The big drawback will be the 640x480 resolution of the older laptop system, but I can work with that. The 8Mb on the laptop will likely just barely enough to handle managing the display and networking code.

    Adding a cheap and semi-legal low power FM broadcasting homebuilt kit to the sound card on the same server should allow me to set up a simple web based interface to play any of my MP3's and pick them up with a walkman, or any other stereo in the house.

    Note that this solution is totally tweaked towards bang for the buck, not high performance (sound quality, bandwidth, etc).

    However, it is dirt cheap (should be able to do the whole deal for less then $200), and all relies on proven, flexible, and established technology, and will likely be plenty "good enough". Support for the Webgear Aviatior cards is opensource (as far as I can tell), and is already a part of the kernel (as far as I can tell).

    If anyone is interested in the nuts and bolts of this procedure once I get everything working, I will be happy to post detailed instructions and parts sources on my site. The kit is backordered, so it could show up tomorrow, or sometime next century.

    Bill Kilgallon

  • Re:Health Side Effects???? (Score:4)

    by dattaway ( 3088 ) on Monday February 28, 2000 @06:09AM (#1240900) Homepage Journal
    Considering your microwave oven is 1000 to 2000 watts and your wireless network card is a wimpy 100mW, good luck at getting it to heat a cup of coffee or your brain.
  • It could.

    Why bother though. You've got to set up and administer the box, with both a WaveLan system and a regular Ethernet card. If you use the gateway, it will do it for you. Same result, different approach. Also, in most cases, I think the Linux PC would be more expensive, unless you already have one lying around.

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • If the linux box was set up properally it could probably do the same thing (I haven't tried personally so can't say for certain). We sell the product for those who don't want to have to set it up themselves.
  • Check it out at http://world.std.com/~corey/raylink.html

    I only post this because the story seems to suggest that only the wavelan cards are supported under Linux.

    Of course, the WebGear Aviator 2.4 cards that I have are only 2 Mbps, but that's good enough for me, because I'm using them to share a 256 kbps DSL connection. And I think they're a lot cheaper - I got 2 cards + 2 isa-pcmcia adapters for $110 at CrapUSA (that includes a $40 rebate).

    The Aviator 2.4 cards are also supported by NetBSD, and it shouldn't take all that much work to get the NetBSD driver to work for OpenBSD and FreeBSD.
  • Well going to the "Support" link then going to the "Software Libray" open gave me some nice drop down boxes where one of the OS's listed was linux..

    I ended up with <a href="http://www.wavelan.com/support/software/desc ription.html?id=211">this</a> link.

    You have to have the PCMCIA services source to install & use it though

    --

  • Re:Price (Score:1)

    by whoop ( 194 )
    And how's that different from the $180 Gold Wavelan card that does encryption? This doesn't seem like that much of a savings. ;)

  • This screams for wire-level crypto (Score:4)

    by Overfiend ( 35917 ) on Monday February 28, 2000 @06:18AM (#1240909) Homepage

    With the proliferation of wireless devices like this, it seems to be more important than ever to make sure that we aren't sending unencrypted packets between machines.

    Does the 802.11 spec cover this, or is it just a connectivity protocol for wireless devices (I assume the latter)?

    900 MHz cordless phones have made claims to some sort of encryption for years, but I don't take what they put on the box at face value -- I suspect it's pretty weak stuff.

    Can somebody provide some pointers to IP-level cryptography? I'll be wanting to go with an in-home set up like this in the near future but I really chafe at the idea of how trivially easy it would be for people to sniff my packets. I realize that encryption is easily built into higher-level protocols, but I really like the idea of minimum disclosure to eavesdroppers, particularly for signals that otherwise wouldn't even leave my home (not everything is outbound to the ISP, you know).

  • A couple things:

    I just installed these things for the first time on friday, and was thoroughly impressed. They're working well in our industrial complex, despite poor placement on our part (haven't run any benchmarks yet, it could be dropping to a lower speed).

    A couple observations: The gateway is really just a little bridge. Don't plan on getting 11Mbps out of it though-- it has a 10BaseT interface on the other side! Perhaps someone could put together a nice little embedded linux solution. :)

    Also, you're back to shared media days. It's like putting everyone on a 10Mb hub. I don't know if there's any way to get it to scale (probably not if they all use one frequency) by breaking it down into more networks.

    - Matt Ingenthron

  • Is the lack of promiscuous mode because of the driver, or the hardware? Does Lucent not want people putting a $200 card in their Linux box to replace a $1000 base station?

  • Open source driver here: (Score:4)

    by Booker ( 6173 ) on Monday February 28, 2000 @06:30AM (#1240916) Homepage
    this page [fh-dortmund.de] has the open source driver, and it's still being actively developed.

    ---

  • Cheap? (Score:2)

    by Booker ( 6173 )
    The list price of the ORINOCO PC Card is $179; the PCI and ISA adapter are $69 each, and the RG-1000 Residential Gateway is $349.

    So let's see... from my gateway to my laptop, I need:

    $179 card for the laptop
    $179 card for the PC
    $69 cheesy pcmcia adapter for PC
    ----
    $427 for the minimum setup..

    Ack. Don't you hate it when post-IPO dot-com-ers decide for you what's "cheap?" :-)

    ---

  • I own a WaveLAN Silver and my roommates have a few Bronze Turbos. To let them get on the internet wirelessly, I purchased a cheap PC-700 PCMCIA card reader for my desktop linux box. The reader worked like a charm with the latest PCMCIA package drivers (3.10.something) and the source drivers wvlan_cs2 from ftp.WaveLAN.com. The PCMCIA reader cost $50 from buy.com and something minimal for shipping. So you can get the wavelan card for cheap ($120?) and have a desktop system on the wireless lan for $170 + a little shipping.

    The cool thing about this reader is that I can have two PCMCIA slots on the FRONT (it goes in a 3.5 or 5.25" drive bay -- adapter included) of my PC, so I can also read things like digital camera flash cards. This is an ISA card, btw but then again it's only PCMCIA so you can't expect really high bandwidth.

    Overall, the installation of the hardware took 15 minutes and configuring/compiling the software/drivers took around 3 hours after poking around to get ad-hoc networking up. After that it's been extremely reliable and very tolarant of me pulling out the card and reinserting it on the fly.

    I found this web page really helpful for the configuration: here [hp.com].

  • Re:This screams for wire-level crypto (Score:3)

    by stripes ( 3681 ) on Monday February 28, 2000 @06:44AM (#1240926) Homepage Journal
    With the proliferation of wireless devices like this, it seems to be more important than ever to make sure that we aren't sending unencrypted packets between machines.

    Does the 802.11 spec cover this, or is it just a connectivity protocol for wireless devices (I assume the latter)

    802.11 has a encryption spec for it (I think the original "Wire Equivolent Privicy" had a 4-bit RC4 -- which is about worthless, thw Lucent Gold cards advertise a 128bit crypto, so I guess it got better).

    However I don't think that is the right way to fix the problem. After all if you transmit important data and it is encrypted over 802.11, but unencrypted out the cable plant, across the global backbone, and off to wherever you sent it, you have only fixed about 100 feet worth of a (possabbly) multi-thousand mile problem.

    Can somebody provide some pointers to IP-level cryptography? I'll be wanting to go with an in-home set up like this in the near future but I really chafe at the idea of how trivially easy it would be for people to sniff my packets. I realize that encryption is easily built into higher-level protocols, but I really like the idea of minimum disclosure to eavesdroppers, particularly for signals that otherwise wouldn't even leave my home (not everything is outbound to the ISP, you know).

    Exactly! Try looking at IPSEC, it is required for IPv6, and optional for IPv4. You could also just try to tunnel everything through SSH.

  • Nokia [nokia.com] has Wireless LAN Products [nokia.com] as well. I expect that they will be easier to get in Europe than the Lucent stuff.

    The other day, I was going to post an "Ask Slashdot" to see if anyone had tried to use Nokia Wireless LAN products, if anyone knew if they were planning to explicitly support Linux, and how best to pressure them to do so. Sounds like it will be easier given the fact that we can point to Lucent support for Linux.

    If anyone has any answers to the questions I asked above, let me know.
    --

    Dave Aiello

  • Dork! Spare us the sarcasm and use your head when you read peoples' posts.

    He's not asking if his linux box cabn magically pickup radio waves, he's asking whether he can install a $179 card in his router and a $179 card in his (say) laptop, and have the two talk together, or whether he *needs* the seperate, external $350 (>> $179) residential gateway which has (DHCP, NAT, Ethernet) nothing his router can't do already!

    A partial answer: the hardware can do it (I know a guy who works on them) but I dunno whether the GPL drivers can. (But if i had to bet I would guess they do...)
  • Well, I can deny it, based on the fact that Bluetooth has dick-all to do with 802.11 and wireless networking.

    Bluetooth *IS* slow, and *IS* short range, and that won't change; it's not supposed to and doesn't need to.

    And Lucent isn't having any problem maintaining market share. Those 11Mbps cards WAIL!

  • my company is using wavelan extensively with linux, we actually have wavelan connecting two store on seperate islands, in the virgin islands and it seems to work quite well.

  • Basestation/gateway does more then you think! (Score:4)

    by stripes ( 3681 ) on Monday February 28, 2000 @07:02AM (#1240937) Homepage Journal
    The hardware gateways are fairly expensive, but simply setting them up peer to peer and using IP Masqing works pretty well.

    That will work, but "ad hoc" mode (which is the "no base station" mode) misses out on a few things you get when you have the access-point/basestation thing.

    • The access-point can hold packets for systems that have going into low-power mode, and only turn on the reciever once every few seconds. This allows greatly reduced battery use (like less then 5% of normal use!) when you arn't doing much with the network. The low-power mode is not used in "ad hoc" mode because you might never get your messages! The low-power mode can be used anytime you have nothing to transmit, and havn't recieved anything for a second or two, so between clicks on a web page you can be saving power.
    • The access-point can arange to use a RTS/CTS protocall where it tells everyone who gets the "wire" for the next thousand or so bit-times, which greatly reduces the hidden tranmitter* [slashdot.org] problem, and increses the effectave range (and the bandwidth at longer ranges).
    • Some funky things also can be done with multiple access points, but I'm not quite sure what they are. I think they end up just being able to bridge together multiple wireless nets, which isn't a big deal if you are ok with changing your IP address when you roam from one net to another. This is probbably a non-issue in a normal sized house, but could be a big deal in a reasonable sized office building (we need two access points per floor).

    So if you are using unpluged laptops, a base station will can increse your battery life. If you have problems getting the range you want a base station can help that too.



    * The hidden transmitter is where you have, say, three machines, A, B, and C. A can hear B but not C, C and hear B but not A, and B can hear both. If A and C both talk they don't hear each other, so they won't do the ehternet I-heard-a-collision-while-I-was-talking-so-I'll-ba ck-off thing. B will hear both messages, but they will damage each other, so all B will realy hear is a really long collison. With an access point (either where B is, or close by) it will mediate A and C's demands to talk. The RTS (request to send) is a ver short message so the chances of collisons when sending them is quite low. There is a slight increse in latency this way.

  • Well... on that note.
    I use a Lucent 2Mbps 802.11 card on my laptop, and when I got my hands on an 11Mbps version, I slapped it in, and linux gave me two nice positive beeps.. and it seemed to work.. but then it didn't. Couldn't tcpdump, couldn't communicate with the other hosts on the lan.... so perhaps we needa bit of driver tweaking. (I am using the latest wavelan drivers)

    Hey.. it didnt' crash though..

  • CMU has a very large deployment of Lucent Wavelan (using it right now!). Since these things can hop between different frequencies ("channels"), it's possible to put a few stations in a lecture hall so that everyone doesn't have to share one frequency. Through careful planning it's possible to spread the signal out arbitrarily far (most of our campus is covered, even outside).

    Check out http://www.cmu.edu/computing/wireless/ -- they talk a bit about what they do to scale.

  • Re:Health Side Effects???? (Score:5)

    by mindstrm ( 20013 ) on Monday February 28, 2000 @07:07AM (#1240940)
    Well. That's a tough one. Scientifically, how do you prove that something is harmless?

    Here's a few facts though.
    2.4Ghz is not ionizing radiation. It can't break down molecular bonds. (This is the chief cause of damage from higher-energy radiation, UV and up...)

    2.4Ghz is the frequency (well.. 2.45) that most microwaves ovens run at. They don't mutate your food.. they just warm it up. (Really, that's all they do.. warm it up by vibrating polarized molecules.. chiefly water)

    These network cards use in the neighborhood of 50 to 100 milliwats of power. Your cellphone probably uses about 10 times that. Your microwave only cooks things because it uses 6000 times that (600 watts)

    If you turned your microwave on, with the door open (if you could) and stood there.. or if you just had a leak,the only thing that would happen is you would heat up. it wouldn't mutate your DNA, it would just increase your body temperature. Granted, if this happened rapidly, or in a focused area, it could be dangerous.... but that's all it does.

    And the proof is in society. So far,there really aren't any problems.
  • They are very cool.. I remember snagging a Slackware bootdisk from them so I could install 1.2.xx on another vendors Initio controller. Sent them an email about the difficulties I had getting the ball rolling (the boot disk intermittantly hung), with repeated mention that it wasn't their card. They responded quickly, nicely, and to the effect that it would indeed be fixed quickly. They then sent a 'problem has been fixed' email a couple of days later.

    I now own two of their controllers.
  • They sell a serial/ethernet gateway for the cards in this article. It's $349.00. Maybe worth it if the machine you are sacrificing is worth more than that.
  • Well, not sure if this helps too much, but go to any computer swap meet and you could probably score a PCMCIA adapter for about 5 bucks...

    --
  • I think this poster's native language is Spanish. And I bet his English is better than your Spanish. Anyhow, grammar flames suck. Get a life.
  • Which model of card do you use? (e.g. Aviator2.4, etc.)? If I locate the "hub" in my room, I'd need to cover atleast 50 feet horizontally through a couple walls/rooms, and up one floor too. Ideally, I'd like to locate it in my basement and network my entire house like that (2-3 floors). What kind of speed do you think I could expect in this situation? And are you using Linux as the hub (I need to run NAT/ipmasqing)? Had something else I wanted to ask, but I forget now....

    thanks

  • I looked at your setup and I was supprised to clearly see the MAC address.

    It really is a conspiracy by the Clinton administration to prevent consumer privacy by having funny rules about encryption. Visit my wireless lan in Starkville, Mississippi and send your president a letter about how you would like freely distributable encryption. I'm sure the Secret Service are going to get lots of these querries from a great deal many other places too.

    Here's what you need to know:
    gateway: 192.168.1.1
  • Hi, I'm planning on wireless networking my house. I'd like to use my Linux box for NAT/ipmasing, and connect wintel PCs and laptops. If I could use this, that would kick ass.
  • How does the power of one of these 2.4Ghz low power transmitters compare to the EMF already emitted from common electronic appliances such as a laptop.

    This is by no means a scientific measurement of RF power, but last night when my little Nokia digital cell phone rang under my 17 inch monitor, the screen shifted to the left just before the call. It takes power to mess up a monitor. The 5 watt UHF Motorola radios at work will move the picture on the computer monitors half way to the left. Back in my teenage years, I remember a 150 PEP mobile 11 meter linear amplifier that would invade all televisions and telephones on a block. (I would strongly discurage the use of said amplifier for reasons other than safety.)

    Taking my directional antenna and feeding the full power of a flood ping to the heart of my monitor does . . . nothing. So, my guess is that these wireless devices are not as potent as the mighty 600 milliwatt cell phone.

  • Oh yeah.. (Score:3)

    by FallLine ( 12211 ) on Monday February 28, 2000 @08:33AM (#1240978)
    in case you're not sure what I need to know. I'm not that familiar with these wireless networking technologies yet. Do I need one of those hubs/access points, or can I just plug the "client" PC card into my Linux box, and use that as my NAT. Also, where did you order it from... Any advice, problems, latency issues, speed, etc....

    Thanks
  • You bring up an interesting point. Consider that microwaves operate at 2.4GHz. Wireless lans operate at 2.4GHz. Now, microwave ovens are in use around here, but haven't caused me a problem in the past;

    however, if some nut decides to take his loud 2.4GHz oven apart and aim the waveguide in my general direction, my crystal controlled 2.4GHz connection can be expected to fail.
  • As I understand from looking at some of the earlier hardware (3 years ago to present), the older hardware (1 and 2 mbit) is/was FHSS -- you could program the hop times on some cards. The new hardware uses DSSS as that's about the only way to get into the higher speeds and ranges at the same power levels.

    Every card I've ever been "allowed" *grin* to take apart had Raytheon transmitter components. In fact, they were all OEM Raytheon Raylink adapters. (Breezecom, WebGear, a few "non-companies"...) I don't know what AT&T put in their cards...

    [I would caution people thinking wireless is the holy grail... the transmitter may not fry you and your pets, but it can interfere and even in rare cases damage components inside your computer. My breezecom card does interesting things to audio playback and messes up a few VHF channels. (If I look closely, I can see pixel interference on the screen too.)]
  • Physically, yes. However, that's not all it does. There's good bit of processing inside there. For the simple case of two machines, an "ad-hoc" network is perfectly ok -- both cards talk directly to each other.

    In an "infrastructure" network, all the cards talk to an access point. This has the net effect of doubling the range between mobile units. As a mobile unit moves around, it can switch from one AP to another -- which ever one has the best signal, just like a cell phone. With enough access points placed throughout a building, one can move freely about the complex and never lose connectivity.
  • True, microwave ovens don't mutate your food (much). The microwave frequency is centered on the hydrogen vibration frequency of a water molecule -- the two hydrogen atoms in H2O aren't in a rigid alignment. The microwave energy intensifies the vibration thus heating the substance -- temperature equals average kenetic energy. This has the net effect of driving the water out of most things -- take for example, bread... need I say more?

    However, water is not the only "perfect receiver". Sugar also absorbes the microwave energy very well. So well in fact, that the "water" in the sugar can be wrenched out of the sugar molecules leaving behind the carbon. (It's a fun experiment, but I'm not responsible for any damage to your microwave, person, house, pets, etc.)

    This brings me to the non-ionizing radiation part... This is true. The microwave signal isn't going to hit a strand of DNA and break it like a gamma ray. However, many of the molecular substances in the human body will absorb microwave energy and eventually be damaged. In your example of standing infront of a microwave with the door open, if you stood there long enough, it would blind you. (Of course, if you stood there "too long", your blood would boil and you would subsequently explode -- odds are, you'd already be well on your way to dead by then anyway.)

    And the proof is in society. So far,there really aren't any problems.
    Aside from insane and/or stupid people placing living things (babies, dogs, etc.) in their microwave.

    PS: This is also why the 2.4GHz band is unlicensed. Too many things in the environment absorb or otherwise interfere with the signal(s).
  • Sorry for asking but how exactly would I hook up something that amplified the signal of these devices to make it work over a mile or so?

    See the situation is like this, I can get ADSL (I'm right at the service edge) But my cousin who lives about a mile or so down the street can't get it. If we could hook him up under my ADSL it would be a great solution especially if I could do it under linux. He's been begging me to find some solution to his problem. So I'm intrested in the cost of the equipment and how the setup would actually work. (The hardware end, I have a few spare IPs).
  • nothing against wavelan, but the Webgear Aviator also has fully gpl'd
    drivers, and you can pick these up at almost any computer store(compusa,
    frys, buy.com) for under $200. I got these going in my house, one in my
    router box and one in my laptop, and i routine pull 120k-200k a sec from
    across my house. Also, the webgear *include* the isa-to-pcmcia bridge
    cards, unlike the wavelans. overall, these have been extremely stable
    cards, with solid working drivers under linux and windows, and full
    compatbility between the two, which is nice.
  • The reason microwave radiation heats up food and liquids isn't the power output,

    Try again. My experiments with microwave attenuation, S band 2.4GHz and X band 10GHz, show otherwise. I found most organic things absorb high frequencies into heat. Here's a quote from this link that looks into microwave behavior: [virginia.edu]

    It's a common misconception that the microwaves in a microwave oven excite a natural resonance in water. The frequency of a microwave oven is well below any natural resonance in an isolated water molecule, and in liquid water those resonances are so smeared out that they're barely noticeable anyway.

    Here are some more unwise [amasci.com] things to do with microwave ovens and a link to microwave myths.

    More interesting stuff:

    Here are some more ways to destroy [utwente.nl] your microwave oven (not recommended!)
  • Latching oneself into the cable plant would be far harder than driving through the parking lot with a receiver in the trunk...

    "Latching oneself into the cable plant" isn't needed if the office uses hubs. Walk into an office, and use the ethernet jack there. Frequently even the confrence rooms have them. Driving through the parking lot isn't likely to get you much at my office, 802.11 seems to have a hard time escaping the semi-reflectave coating on the windows (which I susspect was put on to make it impossable to get FM radio reception inside!).

    However smartass aside, yes, it is simpler to tap into a wirless net then a wired one, at least if you are talking about an office LAN. If you are talking about a Internet connection from home, there are generally wires outside that are fairly easy to tap into (the demark for my T1 may be inside, but it is obvious which wires coming into the house are the T1!). Plus if the tap is being done by the ISP, or the LEC (presumably as the result of a goverment order) it is even easyer then them driving anywhere near the transmiter!

    I'm thinking the encryption is not so much to protect the information "end to end" but to protect the "over the air where bad people can hear it without me being able to stop them."

    I still think it is much-much-much better to do end-to-end-encryption then just cover one link hop. After all, do you want to solve the problem once and be done with it forever, or do you want to solve it for 802.11, 802.3, HDLC, async-PPP, and on and on for several new network technologies each year? Plus wouldn't it be better to be able to communicate securly from home to work, or your home to your friends home, and not just the last 100 feet of each connection?

    Additionally, the wireless traffic is generally going to be "local" traffic.

    And only my local traffic needs to be private? I should be worried someone might snoop the MP3's I'm sending to my bedroom, but not care if they see the smut I'm fetching from Australia? Or maybe the research I'm doing on a new drug the HMO doctor wants to put me on? I want it all private. Every bit. Over as many miles of the path as I can get.

  • Does anyone know any pointers to the security surrounding the use of these cards? Specifically, if I use one of these setups can someone who happens to be w/in 1500 feet of me now snoop my communications? I know I could set up freeswan but I would like to know if I have to.

    Curious?
    - Mark
  • Well, almost. I wish there were OpenBSD drivers for them.

    Bandwidth in megabits/sec isn't the big deal for wireless; its connectivity, range and compatibility that counts.

    I do wish devices with crypto didn't cost more (even silly 40 or 64 bit crypto prevents casual eavesdropping). It's not like putting it in the product costs the vendors anymore (I wouldn't be surprised if non crypto enabled cards have the crypto silicon on them; just disabled)
  • ....with the notable exception of FRANCE, who assigned the 2.4ghz range to the military. DOH!
  • Some funky things also can be done with multiple access points, but I'm not quite sure what they are. I think they end up just being able to bridge together multiple wireless nets, which isn't a big deal if you are ok with changing your IP address when you roam from one net to another.

    Repeat after me: M o b i l e I P, Mobile IP.
    Just install a good Mobile IP software to your "access points" and forget about the changing IP..

    --
  • I haven't looked at any PCMCIA specs carefully, but the ISA card looks pretty much like a bunch of bus driver chips. There's a weird pair of wide ribbon cables that go to the actual PCMCIA ports. It's like two IDE cables piggie-backed.

    There's some actual circuitry in the drive-like thing, but it may just be stuff to control starting and stopping the cards/power support stuff, so it very well could be close to ISA.

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