Choose a WAP

[ewx]

Can anyone recommend an 802.11g capable wireless access point? (I'm currently using a PCI card for this purpose but am getting tired of driver doom.) The only wireless device it'd routinely serve is my iBook but visitors might be expected to bring their laptops occasioanlly.

Relatedly, can someone explain what level these devices operate on? I get the impression from manuals and googling that they are layer 2 devices and act like a repeater or bridge between a wired ethernet LAN and a wireless LAN, but could do with confirmation from someone more knowledgeable.

Comments

[3c66b.livejournal.com]

I've just bought one of these (http://www.dabs.com/uk/shopbybrand/3com/ProductView.htm?quicklinx=2PTK) (replacing a D-Link 802.11b AP that seemed to be dying) and am entirely happy with it. Haven't had it long enough to say much about reliability, but it plugged straight in to my network, was easily configurable, and does WPA as well as WEP, which a lot of the APs in the price range don't seem to.

Yes, they're just repeaters. The ones I've seen will act as DHCP servers etc if you want them to, but out of the box they just forward stuff. (That means, for the paranoid, there are security implications if you just put one on your internal network.)

paranoid

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I was expecting to require another NIC and a crossover cable. I don't currently encrypt the wireless LAN anyway, but rather do almost everything via SSH (or VPN, except the darwin tunnel driver I was using was unstable, so I gave up on that).

[imc.livejournal.com]

We have that (the 3Com one) and it seems fine apart from the occasional problem of PCMCIA cards apparently losing the signal even though the access point is about two metres away in direct line of sight.

The setup documentation rather assumes Windows, but if you have a DHCP server on your network then it will take an address from that, and hence you'll know what IP to connect to in order to get the web management interface (which for some reason requires JavaScript).