Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 10:01:49 -0700 (PDT) From: David Wolfskill <david@catwhisker.org> To: david@catwhisker.org, vdue@zen.tc Cc: freebsd-mobile@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Dell Inspiron 2500 and what 802.11b Message-ID: <200104301701.f3UH1nK28578@bunrab.catwhisker.org> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.32.0104300921550.19465-100000@beowulf.zen.tc>
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>Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 09:36:19 -0700 (PDT) >From: Michael DuFresne <vdue@zen.tc> >I have looked at the Cisco cards, but dang, they are expensive. From >what I can tell, a Cisco card+ap is $700. I was hoping to keep the >costs down to a reasonable level without sacrificing too much >functionality/security. Just because you're using a Cisco PCMCIA card does *not* mean that you necessarily need to use a Cisco AP -- or *any* AP, for that matter. The whole point of the "Wi-Fi" branding is so folks can have some degree of assurance that the products will interoperate. (The crack about "any AP" refers to the possiblity of using a pair of cards, one in an ISA (or PCI?) adapter, in ad-hoc mode.) (At home, I use an Apple AirPort AP with the Cisco/Aironet cards.) >Stupid question time: If I apply patches from an external source (ie >other than from cvsup..), how is cvsup affected? Well, that depends. :-} (You probably could reasonably have expected that "answer".) What I do is use CVSup to maintain a local CVS repository. And by doing that, I can hack my own /usr/src tree as much as I want, and as long as I have a running system, I can blow stuff away and get it back to "normal" pretty easily. Before doing things this way, I had tried just using CVSup to update my sources, and that proved to be rather annoying. Maybe there's some "trick" to it, but having my own mirrored FreeBSD repository appears to be a far easier approach. >I'm in Walnut Creek. Eh; that's what I get for trying to ascribe geography to TLDs. I should know better by now; sorry. :-} There's a BAWUG meeting Thursday of this week. (The meeting is in Redwood City this time; I'd plan to attend, but I have a prior committment.) >All that I really need to get working is a wireless link to my home >network. I have a few machines working now with various OSes. Work has >stated that I can do some work from home provided I can get a VLAN >working to the Cisco routers at work. So, if I'm going to telecommute, >I might as well do it from the lanai. Quite so. >For the work part, the laptop will use that Redmond stuff, but I want >to make sure I can also use FreeBSD whenever I'm not using the laptop >for 'work'. :-} For my home stuff, I'm using WEP (though it's weak, I fancy it may provide some deterrent), as well as restricting the AP to talking only with cards that use MAC addresses I list for it (though the MAC address can be changed at will, again, I fancy it is some deterrent), and I use SSH for any communication from the laptop to any machines where I get shell prompts. Hope this is of some use, david -- David H. Wolfskill david@catwhisker.org As a computing professional, I believe it would be unethical for me to advise, recommend, or support the use (save possibly for personal amusement) of any product that is or depends on any Microsoft product. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-mobile" in the body of the message
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