Date: Fri, 05 Apr 2002 11:14:36 -0800 From: "Bruce A. Mah" <bmah@freebsd.org> To: Mike DeGraw-Bertsch <mbertsch@radioactivedata.org> Cc: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Article on wireless networking on FreeBSD Message-ID: <200204051914.g35JEaif026629@intruder.bmah.org> In-Reply-To: <3CAC17E4.30205@radioactivedata.org> References: <3CAC17E4.30205@radioactivedata.org>
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If memory serves me right, Mike DeGraw-Bertsch wrote: > With some relatively minor changes, I think it'd be a useful part of the > handbook. It's online at > http://www.radioactivedata.org/wireless_freebsd.html. I'd appreciate > any thoughts, comments, critiques, or criticism. Hi Mike-- I agree that this would be useful to have...whether as a part of the Handbook or a separate article is not clear to me yet. The Handbook *is* lacking any coverage at all on 802.11* networking. High-level comments: In general I liked the article...there's a lot of good information in here. The biggest criticism I have about it is that it's not clear at the outset what the subject of the article is. In other words, is it about 802.11* networks on FreeBSD in general, or setting up a FreeBSD machine to act as a BS, or...???... An introduction might help. You mentioned that many commercial APs don't do IPsec or IPv6. That's true, but the Aironet 352 AP I have doesn't need to. It's just a link-layer bridge...I routinely run IPv6 over it, no problem. I suspect most of the APs that don't have aspirations of being routers work the same way. I don't necessarily agree with the "stick with 40-bit WEP cards and save your money" comment. Last time I bought Aironet PCMCIA cards, I thought that 128-bit was the same price as 40-bit anyways. (Granted, I was *at* Cisco at the time.) "Cool. How do I set it up?" It isn't obvious here whether this is for a laptop/workstation or for a BS. It might be better to more explicitly separate the setup for a typical client machine with the setup needed for a BS. I'd imagine more people have to do the former than the latter. "Wireless configuration": I thought the frequency setting was ignored in BSS mode? I might be wrong on this. Also, I put most of the functionality of your script into /etc/start_if.an0 (for example) so that I don't need to touch pccard.conf. /etc/rc.network and /etc/ pccard_ether call the startup script for each interface automatically, if needed. "Client Configuration": I was confused here. What was the part I'd been reading for the last few pages before this? "Hey, is this secure?": Might be nice to say here that there is no single technique to prevent hijacking of a network or eavesdropping, but a combination of mechanisms can be effective (e.g. WEP + IPsec). Nice article...hope these comments are of some help. Thanks for putting it up! Bruce. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
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