Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 14:08:24 -0400 From: Peter Radcliffe <pir@pir.net> To: mobile@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Wireless base stations Message-ID: <20010710140824.A10817@pir.net> In-Reply-To: <rmipub955lq.fsf@fnord.ir.bbn.com>; from gdt@fnord.ir.bbn.com on Tue, Jul 10, 2001 at 08:30:25AM -0400 References: <200107092007.f69K7XJ21410@harmony.village.org> <rmipub955lq.fsf@fnord.ir.bbn.com>
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Greg Troxel <gdt@fnord.ir.bbn.com> probably said: > Can people comment if these cheap APs are running in true > 'infrastructure mode' and can support multiple APs on an ethernet with > roaming across APs similar to the Lucent AP500? Yes, you can, if they are set up correctly. I have two cheap base stations in my house and can roam between them - the key is to set the SSID to be identical, the wired side be in the same collision domain, their signal areas overlapping and use channels that do not overlap in frequency range. One gotcha - the RG-1000 will notlet you change the first 5 or 6 characters of the SSID, so you can't use multiple RG-1000s for roaming. You can use airports, however, and many other cheap gateways. > Specifically, if I bought 14 of the cheapest Linksys bridges and put 2 > to a floor on my 7-story building all on an Ethernet run around to all > 14 of them, and set them to different channels, would I then be able > to wander around floor to floor and stay on the net with the same IP > address? but as someone else has pointed out it's far more complicated than that. You have to have signal overlap, correct channels with no frequency overlap (you can only use 1, 6 and 11), etc. > One person commented 'no filtering by MAC'. Does this mean that every > packet on the wired Ethernet will end up over the air, even if it is > unicast and the corresponding address is not associated with the AP? > Does this differ between the cheap APs and the Lucent products > (AP-500/1000, ignoring the RG)? I said "no filtering by MAC" and meant that the particular gateway I was talking about has no MAC address access filters - you can't choose which MACs can talk to the bridge. Other base stations can do this. The base stations are bridges. Many packets end up over the air, including all broadcast and multicast packets. Do not trust an 802.11b network to be secure. It can't be made secure. WEP helps against denial of service attacks and prevents other simple attacks but has been broken and there is no replacement. The only way to dowireless networking securely is to run secure protocols over the connection. > I realize I'm asking different questions; I'm considering what it > takes to set up my building at work rather than a single AP for home It's a non-trivial undertaking. There are courses at USENIX and LISA amongst other places in the basics of doing this. P. -- pir pir@pir.net pir@net.tufts.edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-mobile" in the body of the message
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