Wireless Networking, part 1

This entry is actually from Friday/Saturday – but I had a problem which I couldn’t be bothered to fix – more in the next entry. Its fixed now. Obviously. Here’s the entry.

Just acquired a pair of old Lucent/Agere/Orinoco/whatever WavePOINT/WaveACCESS access points. Well, strictly speaking they seem to be wireless bridges – no DHCP, and the laptop I’m typing this on grabbed its IP address from the DCHP server on my DSL router. But hey – I can fix stuff like that later.

Quite a performance getting this set up actually. The APs had been changed from the default IP and password settings (good – so they should be) and I had a bit of a time finding and figuring out a way to reset them. Eventually I discovered that you need to put them into “force update” mode and upload new firmware, which resets everything. So I did, and with not too much faffing have managed to get things working.

Down sides so far: well, I haven’t figured out how to do MAC address filtering, so my whole network is wide open at the moment. Bummer. But I’ve done a bit of netstumbling and there doesn’t seem to be anyone in the building who’s likely to leap in and start buggering about. Plus I will figure it out – as soon as I find some kind of decent manual which’ll tell me how it works. Hopefully that manual will also tell me what the boxes are capable of, cos I’m damned if I can tell.

Never mind – wireless access ahoy. All I have to do is lock it down, and maybe attach one of the external aerial boxes I have. Sorted!

Published

One comment

Comments are closed.