Just a quick question about Wireless networking, and as I'd like to add that to the Empeg as and when it arrives, I want to make sure I'm doing the right thing now.

I was having a poke around trying to find suppliers - they do like to hide themselves, don't they - and found the Lucent WaveLan (or is it now called Orinoco - they haven't done a good job of rebranding). For the ethernet bridge, 4 PCMCIA cards, one ISA adapter and one antennae amplifier thingy, they want the best part of £1000 from me. The ethernet adapter (which I'd need for the Empeg) is another £200 So, two questions:

1 - Is there anything cheaper I could buy which does the same job?

2 - Any other ideas?

Nick.

Check the thread below and check out the product from OTC called AirEZY. Runs about $200 U.S. per side and works with existing ethernet adapters.

AirEZY

Rob and Hugo have mentioned that they've got the Airport system working with a Mk.2 unit, so that should also be considered as a viable option.

Look for the price of an Apple Airport. It has more features then any of the other 802.11HR bridges I have seen, and it's cheaper. ($300 is what I paid for mine, seems to be priced the same everywhere). As for the PCMCIA cards, I bought the 3Com WaveLAN for $158 online.

Plugging in the Airport will keep it a basic bridge. Using a SNMP configuration program called "Configurator", you can change a few things. Or with a Mac, you can change everything, save the files, and use the Configurator program to upload them to the Airport.

My empeg site is:http://24.236.3.131/empeg/

Speaking of the airport...

I've got two G4's upstairs, and a Windows PC I want to move downstairs in my apt. Obviously, I don't want to run twisted-pair through the apt to get to this machine. If I got the airport base unit, and installed it upstairs, what would I need downstairs? Would I need another base unit? I'm trying to avoid installing a new card in the Windows machine (it's a Compaq, and they're finnicky bastards), so I'm trying to think in terms of "something that will run off the existing built-in NIC). Of course, if I've got no choice, I've got no choice.

Help from those who've done this before would be spiffy cool.

D

Airports won't talk to airports, so you just need an 802.11 card for the PC...

Hugo

So (to make sure I'm clear on how this works.... my first foray into 802.11)...

Simply buy an airport base station, throw it on the hub with all the rest of my wired machines, put an airport-compatible 802.11 card in the PC downstairs, make sure the base station is basically in "stupid bridge mode" as opposed to thinking its trying to do something smart managing connections, and away we go?

Yes. The airport defaults to "stupid bridge mode" (at least between the 802.11 and the ethernet) and so there is zero configuration required - you only need that for the modem & if you're setting up security, etc.

It's just like a standard ethernet bridge - it learns MAC (not -intosh) addresses.

Hugo

Thanks guys for the useful information - I've just ordered the AirPort base station from the Swiss Apple site and I'm just about to order some PC cards from Lucent (their WaveLan or Orinoco cards come with Linux drivers as well as for every Windows version).

Now, that's all for the home, what will I need to get my Empeg hooked up into the same thing? Another AirPort base station to sit in the car?

Cheers again,

Nick.

The only problem with an airport in the car is that only clients can connect to it :(

(ie, fine with a client card in your pc: however, to join the empeg seamlessly into your home airport-hosted network, you need a ethernet<>802.11 client adaptor. Lucent do these, which seem to be the same hardware as the airport (but different s/w) and a lot more expensive).

Yeah.. you really want the Empeg to be a CLIENT and not the base-station. Otherwise, if you have a wireless LAN, when you drive away, the network collapses.

You might want to have two options... the first being "Airport in the car" where you include a client PC card, and that's that. OR, you can do "Connect to existing Airport", which assumes you already have an 802.11 LAN of some kind and connects as a Client to it.

D

Thought: Couldn't you have two Airport base stations, one in the house and one in the car, and treat them as two seperate networks? Even though the base stations can't communicate with each other, IIRC it's designed such that there can be multiple networks in the same airspace.

It's not a perfect solution, but you could just use the regular base station most of the time, and when you want to bop songs over to the Empeg, just switch to the car base station.

Heck, maybe you could even be connected to both at the same time, I have no idea.

Alex

Even though the base stations can't communicate with each other

The Apple web site contains very few details of the technical aspects of the AirPort. Having spent considerable time looking at the Lucent site, where there is plenty of information (though you do have to go digging for it), I saw that their base stations (WavePort II) can and do talk to each other. There is no information on the Apple site indicate one way or the other whether two AirPort base stations talk to each other.

From what I can gather from the theory of 802.11 (and I'm far from being an expert), every device, be it an ethernet bridge, PC card or whatever, is just like any other device. So... How does one AirPort base station know to talk to PC cards, but not to another AirPort base station?

There, I think that makes sense - you'll have to forgive me if it doesn't. I know what I mean, it's just that my brain works faster than my fingers :-)

Nick.

They're seeing each other, they're just not talking; the airport is designed to be used to bridge a single wired network to multiple wireless "pools" of service, which users can roam between (eg in a school). So, airports forwarding traffic to/from other airports would just duplicate packets. It's down to the level that one airport *doesn't even see* packets sent by the other (and yes, I picked the same channel, etc) - they don't appear in the packet rx counters at interface level.

There may be a way to configure this behaviour off, but I don't know what it is. I'd love to know, though!

Hugo

I'm not too sure on the configuration you guys are talking about. I haven't any experience with air networks.
What do you use in the car? As most airport/wavelan devices are PC cards or base stations, what does the empeg plug into?
If I have the Airport in the car, as has been mentioned, the LAN colapses when the car leaves. Couldn't I get a _cheap_ UTP card for the PC to connect to the Airport and sit that on the computer. Then I need a Aircard of some description on the EMPEG. How?

OTC's AirEZY is looking better and better. But how does it perform at home?

____________________________
Murray

In theory, the AirEZY ought to perform just as though you had two peer-to-peer computers hooked up together. When the car drives off, then that "terminal" isn't on the network anymore. I've got my computer and my wife's networked via 100BaseT right now. If I got an AirEZY for the car, I'd need one for my computer to do the sending. Then to keep my current wired network in place, I'd need another NIC in my computer to get to my wife's computer -- basically two little subnets.

Get it?

Jambo
Something like #14000 (give or take a few)

The only problem with the AirEZY is that is not currently standards compliant (ie, it won't talk to anyone else's 802.11 wireless stuff).

They say that in a couple of months they'll have compatible units - it's a firmware upgrade, but I've not had a reply from them as to wether the existing units can be user-upgraded.

Hugo

The AirEZY stuff works like a learning bridge; you can just hook one up to your existing hub and this would allow access to the empeg from any machine on your local network - it doesn't have to be hooked direct to a single machine.

Unfortunately, you'd need a 10/100 hub to make this work for you, as it only has a 10mbit wired interface.

Hugo

I didn't think about doing it that way, mostly because I wouldn't need access to the Empeg unit from more than one machine anyway (that's where all the MP3's are).

Man, a 100Mbit Empeg/AirEZY combo would be really slick. :-) I know, baby steps first!

Jambo
Something like #14000 (give or take a few)

OK. I know it's bad form to follow up your own post, but considering I ordered the AirPort on Wednesday and the PCMCIA cards yesterday, imagine my surprise when I got home to find them on my doorstep.

So, a fun evening has been had trying to get my laptop with the wireless card in it to talk over the 10baseT network to the 100baseT network (funnily enough, it works the other way around, but I suspect that that's to do with masquerading......).

So, when I get this mastered, I'll then think about how I can work it with the Empeg in the car.

Nick.

I was just in your city a couple of weeks ago as part of a whirlwind "see Switzerland in 10-days" trip. Very nice waterfront. The Bahnhofstrasse was really cool.

Jambo
Something like #14000 (give or take a few)