[ale] Fun(?) with wireless

[Vincent Fox]

> I just moved into a new house, and I think that I would like to implement a wireless network.  I am going to be getting a wireless laptop from work later this year, and I would like to have my home network setup when I get it.  Currently, I have BellSouth DSL running into a Linksys ethernet router.  My home machine is connected into this router.  However, I do have a ThinkPad with a detached screen that is not in use.  It has an internal PCI ethernet card, and I have a PCMCIA Linksys WPC54G 802.11g
> networking card.  I was thinking that I could setup the laptop as a wireless access point so I wouldn't have to buy a different router.  The problem, as I see it, is that the Linksys card does not have native Linux drivers and that I would need to use ndiswrapper to get it working.  My knowledge of wireless networking is not that good, but from what I can tell at the ndiswrapper home page (http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net), I can only use ad hoc and managed mode, not master.  Anyone know if it is possible
> to set up a wireless access point using this hardware?

There's nothing immoral about running an ad-hoc network!

In fact, the first wireless network I setup was an old Gateway
with Linux and an Orinoco card in an ISA adapter.  The Linux PC
that was my gateway ran NAT and DHCP and it all worked
like a charm as a home-brew AP.

The major advantage of "infrastructure" or AP mode is that nodes
on opposite sides of the AP can communicate with each other
via the AP even though they are out of range of direct comm.

In many cases, you have to talk with the central node
to go out, and don't care about filesharing from one
wireless node to another directly. So the infrastructure
mode doesn't really gain you anything.