The airport flying saucer is $299. It uses a Lucent Wavelan Silver Turbo
11mbits per second PCMCIA card (now branded Orinoco). It uses 40bit WAP
encryption. Lucent has a gold card which uses >100bit encryption (I think its
128bit), something other than WAP, but I forget off the top of my head. You
can get the information by going to http://www.wavelan.com/. There are web
pages out there that show you how to modify the airport to swap the silver for
the gold. Lucent sells their own solutions but they are more costly than
Apples. But you can get some serious range with an add on antenna. There are
web pages that show you how to modifies the airport to add the antenna.
The aiport has Nat, DHCP, but no firewall in the traditional sense. But you
can do things like set up an “allow” list of MAC addresses, password protect
your network, hide automatic discovery of you network, requiring the
connecting computer to name the network and supply the password, and since the
airport supplies the addresses through dhcp and distributes to your internal
network with NAT, you have a single address at the airport that is exposed to
the internet. The *nix running all this is locked up pretty tight.
What people are doing running a line from the wall to a PPPoE modem, to a hub
or switch that has the airport attached. You can then have wireless clients
connect, as well as wired.
THe majority of the cable ISP’s and the DSL ISP’s customers are not
professionals like us, and PPPoE seems to be the perfect solution for an
installer to come hook up for the non professional. I talked to Bell
Atlantic, and they have a professional solution, but it still uses PPPoE. I
guess if you want better, you have to pay through the nose, like a business
would.
Sam Roberts wrote:
Previously, J. Scott Franko wrote in comp.os.qnx:
I’m about to get cable or dsl networking too. I have Apple’s airport,
broadcasting encrypted 802.11 network access throughout my apartment
through its built in modem. When the dsl or cable comes in, I can
connect it to the airport wth ethernet (the airport has both a modem,
and 10mb ethernet port).
That’s interesting, where would I find information on how it’s encrypted?
And the airport does NAT, eh, is it also a firewall? How’s it configured?
Linux and *BSD have a pppdoe driver, so it’s just hurried my firewall
building effort. Still, its pretty frustrating, DHCP is a perfectly
good standard protocol, and Bell’s reasons for turfing it are all bad
for the customer. Arrrgh.
In my research, I have been finding that many people have found devices
to translate pppoe to ethernet ports. If you hit some of the powerbook
newsgroups and websites, you will see many discussions of people hooking
up such services to their airport and powerbooks, using devices from
Linksys, etc. It will definitely apply to your situation as well. I
already have a $99 5 port ethernet switch from Linksys, and the Airport
does NAT and DHCP. All I need is the pppoe translation.
Yes, there seems to be a number of these devices around, but I’m not
going to buy something I can build myself out of the 486 sitting under
my bed…
Cheers!
Sam
p.s. Still the Mac fan, eh! One of my roommates has a 5 year old Mac,
and hopefully I’ll be able to get it connected to the firewall so
she doesn’t have to go to her parents to read e-mail… Didn’t look
too promising, the hardware isn’t cheap.
–
Sam Roberts (> sam@cogent.ca> ), Cogent Real-Time Systems (> www.cogent.ca> )
“News is very popular among its readers.” - RFC 977 (NNTP)
> there’s no such header