Word is that Fry's has this router for $9.99 in their stores. The rebate on that page seems to also work there, so this may be free after rebate if you are luck enough to have Fry's in your area.

I do not, but this is still a killer deal and I will be buying one or more depending on if I can get people to buy them for me to get the multiple rebates. Just passing on an exceptional deal to the board....

whoa! Thanks rob, that is a damn good deal. Do you know how many ports it has?

I think I read just one... but a small hub is cheap as well.

Yeah, just one. But, that is fine for my uses.

As you know, I like to buy things when they're going out of style, and I like to buy them in bulk. I have 4 802.11b access points brand new that I bought for $25 a piece. Now they will be wireless routers!

$25 a peice! For sale or trade? I could bless you or something...

I bought these from Tigerdirect. They were either cheaper at the time, or had a bigger rebate. $40 is still a good deal for a highly-rated AP.

Of course, I could probably part with one of them if that means I get to go to heaven.

Hmmm... looks like a network adapter to me? I always get excited when I see the netgear USB network adapters thinking they're the basic standalone AP that netgear still sells for $100+. I'm still waiting for those to drop in price.

With 802.11b, can I just plug in APs and not wire them to anything and have them work as a repeater? Or does that only work within certain brands that have that feature?

Matthew

I think only certain models of certain brands can be repeaters, and they won't be that cheap. Although, since Linksys (or DLink) has been making them they are not that expensive anymore.

Do these type of routers work with pppoe based dsl?

Yes

I picked one of these up as i passed through, and just opened the box up to cut the UPC off... The best part of the deal is the 12v center postive wall wart. I'm always needing one of those for something...

Matthew
(it's 800mA, but that's proved enough for my single-disk player in the past)

Mmm.. nice price. They won't sell to me (outside USA), but..

Is there anyone on the BBS willing to buy one (or two if possible) of these for me? If you can get one (or two) and route the rebate to yourself, then you could snailmail it/them to me and I'll paypal you.

Email me first, so I don't get too many.

I believe outpost.com and others also have them for the same price.

Thanks!

Whoever does this for me will get bumped to the top of the "docking station" waitlist --> the next dock shipped will be yours, and we'll just deduct what I owe for the router(s) from what you owe for the dock, cutting down on Paypal transactions.

Thanks

-ml

I sent you an email.

These routers are currently $14.95 in-store at Frys, and you can get $10 back on the mail-in rebate.

Well, congratulate me. I've finally made it to the new century and installed 802.11b wireless on our home office LAN.

I got a new old Belkin AP from Radio Shack for CAD$50, and plugged it into the LAN side of one of Rob's $5 routers from Frys.

The router forces (via NAT) all of the wireless clients to show up with a fixed IP on it's "WAN" side regardless of any tricks that WAR driving script kiddies may try. It also has some routing rules to drop any packets with addresses that would otherwise be "valid" on the real internal LAN that lies beyond this router.

The WAN side then connects to the local LAN switch, where it is completely ignored (invalid IP) by all of the machines on the LAN except for my specially configured firewall router (running Linux), which allows SSH and VTUN connections only, and drops everything else.

From the 802.11b equipped laptops, we run a script to establish a BlowFish encrypted VTUN (virtual tunnel) connection over the already WEP encrypted restricted wireless segment, through the cheap router to the real router on the internal LAN. VTUN creates dummy network interfaces on each end of it's encrypted tunnel, which are then used to route ordinary packets securely to/from the local LAN, and from there to/from anywhere.

Maybe I'll write this up for a mag or something..

Cheers
(and thanks again for the cheap router tip, Rob!)

I suppose I should add:

I originally intended to use the router the "other way around", with the wireless AP connected to the WAN side, and have the router block all ports except SSH and VTUN -- forwarding just those two to the internal LAN's Linux server/router.

In fact, that's how it was originally configured. But two problems with this:

(1) script kiddies can play nasty games with their IP addresses on the wireless segment, requiring more care on my part to ensure that the LAN servers don't get fooled. This could be fixed with special routing table entries in the cheap router, I suppose, similar to what I did in the final solution. But..

(2) The cheap router seems to have a 64KByte/sec bandwidth limit for WAN->LAN port forwarding. This was unacceptibly slow.

Reversing the setup, so that the wireless AP was now on the LAN side, resulted in packets following the better optimized (oddly enough) NAT path of the cheap router.

Bandwidth to/from my internal server via the encrypted tunnels and 128-bit WEP AP now maxes out at just under 3Mbits/sec, which is reasonable for a theoretical 11Mbit/sec physical radio medium.

Cheers

(and thanks again for the cheap router tip, Rob!)

My pleasure!