I’m planning on installing a wireless LAN in my new house because my cable entry is on the first floor, and my computer will reside on the second, and I don’t want to try running cables through all my plaster walls.
So, my questions are
Do I have this setup right, or am I missing a piece? PC w/ wireless card/USB wireless adapter<>wireless router<>cable modem.
Opinions on 802.11a vs 802.11g? I’m planning on only running 2, maybe 3 endpoints on the LAN, and I don’t want to drop a huge amount on this stuff.
Have any of you running a wireless net experienced big packet losses? I’ve heard anecdotes of people having their endpoints sitting directly next to the transmitter and still dropping packets.
Recommendations from those running a wireless LAN would be appreciated.
Get this unit. I’ve tried a few different brands and overall Linksys units are da bomb. The price difference between g and non g is a few tens of dollars. Go g mode.
Yep, you’ve got the setup right. Pretty much all you need to do is attach the coax cable to the cable modem, the run a CAT5 cable from the cable modem to the router. Next you’ll need to connect a computer to the router BY CAT5 CABLE ONLY and configure the wireless part of the router. (The reason you need to connect it via wire the first time is that on 99% of the wireless routers I’ve ever dealt with, the router ships with the wireless bit disabled by default.) Next you need only install the wireless LAN card on your PC, assign it an IP address if you’re not using DHCP and enter the WEP key you created on the router (if you use WEP encryption with your wireless setup - it’s far from prefect, but it’s better than nothing).
I’m using the Linksys WRT54G and it is working great. I have two systems hardwired to it, a laptop with an 802.11g Linksys card, and a PDA with an 802.11b Netgear card.
I have the router on a high shelf above my desk and I get perfect signal with everything sitting on it. The signal strength varies as I wander around the house depending on the walls but I can get an okay signal just about anywhere in the house. I even got signal up on the roof at one point when I was calibrating my weather system.
Thanks for the tips, guys. Thought of another question last night; I’m pretty sure I’m using DHCP, but I’ve not had occasion to double check my IPs from session to session (or even really check the settings in the PC after the tech set everything up, for that matter). My question is, if I put another system on the same modem, will I be able to log both on simultaneously?
Yup - that is pretty much the whole point of the router. =)
The easiest setup is for all systems connected to the router to be setup with DHCP - the systems will get all the settings they need from the router. Each system will have its own IP address and the router will sort out which system gets which data.
If you are running a server of some sort you might need to set a machine to have a static IP address so you can setup port forwarding to that machine but most of the time you won’t need to mess with anything like that.