Recent content by Aluminum

I had success doing something a little different Swapping the internal antennas for pigtails with SMA bulkheads (easy) and running them out of the frame neatly (not so easy). From there a pair of rubber duck omnis gets great general range. Its actually not even a swap since I left the originals...

If there is little or no external wifi presence in the area, you could still easily fit 3 decent routers in your budget and spread the load around to channels 1/6/11. I imagine most routers can handle ~15 clients without any real issues, especially on light loads. I managed to have 8 people...

No stock cards, but still options PCI or PCI express? There are quite a few easy to find and fairly cheap dual band pci express cards available. They are almost all in the laptop minicard form factor. PCI is not as easy to find, but there are still many industrial/embedded cards...

Byebye WEP: Good riddance to a false sense of security Some routers with more than one radio let you set multiple networks, I imagine this feature will get more widespread. A cheap basic 2.4 G AP is around $20 now as well. You could always have a "legacy" network with no encryption out in...

Yes, search back for some posts in this forum too Yes, they work fine if your system is compatible. 5300/6300 require a semi modern intel chipset based motherboard such as 9xx or stuff after 2008 or so, atheros/broadcom chips don't seem to care as long as you have drivers. The current...

AppleBSD Considering that the hardware, firmware and original oem developed for it, prevents is correct. Apple has used various chipsets, but with the (for example) atheros 5008-3nx chipset found in some airport cards, 40mhz on any band is clearly supported by the hardware and other OSes...

What you describe is basically just a self built WWAN with VPN, not a part of the intranet. Likely a lot less range, but (hopefully) more bandwidth. Like someone else mentioned, its usually all about management features. Not higher reliability, individual unit range or performance. Find...

Real enterprise should avoid wireless on the intranet like the plague anyways, only as a last resort. They can justify/afford/write off running wires in so many cases that no one else could. Theres still plenty of "enterprise wireless" stuff on the market for those that get suckered in, and...

How is the driveway set up? Is it raised, on a slope? What is the layout of the yard in general? Drainage etc? You might be surprised how easy it could be to run a small conduit underneath that could handle at least a pair of ethernet cables. (never run just 1) You don't have to go in a...

FWIW, the 3700 has no problems keeping up with my FIOS.

The best will not be found in retail I never found any desktop PCI adapters worth using, and I looked long and hard late last year. They are mostly old inventory, very early draft N, G-only and terrible stock drivers. Trying to find out the chipset on most was a pain without buying and...

Ar9220 + ar9223 I was looking around and found this interesting card, definitely something to look at for custom routers. It is sold as a "dual band ar9223" on ebay and a few other places but so far no seller is paying attention just the usual copypasta. They all appear to be the same card...

Yeah, you are dealing with some of the pain of switching over from the older peripheral bus to the newer one. Embedded systems always end up being one of the last to do so, but they are running out of options when nextgen chipsets (like 9003) don't seem to come in pci flavors. The gigabit limit...

Apparently the SR71e is still out there and in production, but they have their heads in the sand on their own website. (and forums to a lesser degree) Its a 400mw 9280 card, should work with regular ath9k drivers. edit: I think the 400mw is some BS that has wormed down through resellers. Based...

If you're really going to go that way, the zotac setup would run circles around them in terms of power for doing routing/NAS/whatever else on top of being an AP. BTW, are you ready to spend nights tweaking linux to do all that? I have seen a little noise about openwrt and dd-wrt people poking...