Greenfield site with wireless BB

Fallschirmjager

Ladies and Gentlemen,

i have got the wonderful BB in wireless form into my house and would like to get it around the house without the extensive use of a fecking kango hammer..

ANyone care to make some suggestions on what they would buy. I am a bit of an avid gamer


I was also just about to buy some firewall software...should i hold ?

thanks for all yuor help

Rew

Buy a WLAN router and clients cards for your laptop/PC and your laughing.

Fallschirmjager

Rew,

any particular make you would recommend?

thanks for the reply

Rew

To be honest I think they are all pretty much equally **** so shop around and see what you can get is your best bet. There are only a handfull of companies that make the actual chips/radios so alot of them are they same thing packaged diferantly.

Generally iv found the 802.11b stuff to be the most stable and reliable, but if you want more then 11mb/s you have to go a or g. With the newer g stuff you have better chances that you will be able to upgrade to the new secuirty standards that are coming out (nothing is definate though though).

If the device you have atm for four BB is a router (ie u have a network cable coming out one side that gives out DHCP addresses) you dont need a router access point.

Fallschirmjager

ha ha ha...excellent info...thanks

i was on amazon in the states and will be getting a delivery from there (and yes you can do it)

should i buy the firewall (software) as well or will they suffice?

Rew

Amazon US site? any time iv looked at that site there has been a disclaimer on the page saying that they wont ship outside the USA. Also I perfer to have some where more local for returns, but its your money.

The a NATing router is a firewall; noting can come from the internet in to your machine (ie: a worm or a nasty hacker) you can still catch a virus/trojan/spyware/etc from dodgy porn sites or warez etc. A software firewall (Zonealarm/norton etc) will track the connections you PC tries to make out giving you more protection. Personally I just use a virus scanner and update it regualarly.

Mr_Man

One tip is to get the PC cards and the Wireless router from the same company as there can be incompatibility problems between different makers. This despite the fact that they all support the same standard,

M.

Fallschirmjager

thanks mr man...

Paulw

I've got a Linksys router/firewall for DSL.

I've got three different wireless cards (one PCI, and two for laptops), all different brands, and they work fine.

All use 802.11g

So far, not a single problem.

BigEejit

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You may have problems if you use a baby monitor / video sender / cordless phone (or neighbours using them that are close to you) if you use 802.11b or g .... they all have to co-exist in the same relatively small slice of spectrum in the 2.4GHz unlicensed band and you could end up with very little or no bandwidth / signal between access point and cards.

I have all 3 of the above (+ a microwave that also works in that spectrum, but I'd be worried it that was leaking) and I found I could not use 802.11b at all .... I had to go for 802.11a gear. That cost a little bit more (HE102 AP's from Netgear are cheap on Ebay) and the stuff is not as plentiful, but you will get similar performance around a house to 802.11G (I get full rate around a large sized 3 bed semi)...

As for security, 152bit WEP is pretty standard in 802.11a and with mac address filtering, using a non-standard address range and turning off DHCP (manually assigning IP's) you can get a pretty secure network .... note that 802.11a is relatively rare and so there is a far less chance of someone stumbling accross your WLAN ...

You can with some of the AP's have a VPN going, unfortunately the HE102 mentioned above that I have doesnt support em (grrrrr)
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