Date: Thu, 27 May 1999 16:37:10 -0400 (EDT) From: Brad Karp <karp@eecs.harvard.edu> To: raj@cisco.com Cc: freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org Subject: wi driver, and base stations vs. ad-hoc mode Message-ID: <199905272037.QAA09549@dominator.eecs.harvard.edu>
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WaveLAN 802.11 supports an "ad-hoc" mode, in which no base station is required, and all hosts with WaveLAN adapters can communicate *directly* with one another. The base station in WaveLAN literally is a MAC-level bridge. If you wanted to use a FreeBSD host with both WaveLAN and wired interfaces as a *router* (at level 3) between the wired net and the wireless one, you could absolutely do this, so long as you have enough address space to split the two LANs (wired and wireless) into distinct prefixes for IP routing. (Otherwise, you might need to use a NAT on the FreeBSD wired-wireless gateway, if the addresses of the wireless net laptops aren't routable to your site from the Internet backbone.) I once thought one could allocate address from the wired subnet to the wireless hosts, and statically configure the wired-wireless gateway host to proxy ARP for these wireless hosts. But I was wrong, of course: this doesn't work because IP doesn't like to forward packets it sees arrive from a multi-access interface when their destinations fall under the netmask of the inbound interface. The "port type" argument to wicontrol lets you configure a WaveLAN NIC into ad-hoc (no base station) mode. See the man page for wicontrol(8). Summary: yes, you can do it. You need distinct subnets on the wired and wireless nets. You need to use wicontrol to configure your laptops and gateway into ad-hoc mode. -Brad, karp@eecs.harvard.edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-mobile" in the body of the message
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