[Linux] Journal.

Went to Mediamarkt today all hyped up and ready to get a Netgear MA311
wireless PCI card for my home computer, but they’ve sold out. I decided
to lash out 40CHF more and get an access point instead.

It’s not a bad deal really, considering  if I had a PCI card I can put this AP
anywhere within range with a power supply, and it could cover a much
larger area for me. I know, I know, it’s an impulse buy. Anyhow it’s
really nice. It has a dark gray casing and it’s tiny - about half the
size of your average AP. It also has two antennas, but you can’t detach
it and connect to an external antenna.

Setup

The access point is connection to my desktop setup as a router
through the ethernet port. The netgear AP can be configured through the
USB interface using netgear software
which runs under windows. The configuration is pretty
straightforward, essid, password, it also has dhcp client. Once it’s
setup, I rebooted into
linux and the AP gets an IP from dnsmasq (the IP assigned can be
checked in /var/lib/misc/dnsmasq.leases).  In linux there’s a packaged
called  ap-utils
that can access the configuration of Netgear ME 102, but you can’t seem to
change some configuration settings such as WEP key right now.

Security

There seem to be quite a few open access  points around, I can see
three from my  apartment, which begs the question of why I’m
getting one myself, peace of mind ok?

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 28th, 2004 at 4:19 pm and is filed under Network. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.