Note : I have since bought a 802.11g wireless router, so this is all out of date!!!

• http://www.pbtech.co.nz/index.php?item=NETLKS4606

• http://www.dse.co.nz/cgi-bin/dse.storefront/44aeaf9406903b8c2740c0a87f99075a/Product/View/XH8287

• http://www.asus.com.tw/products4.aspx?l1=12&l2=43&l3=0&model=409&modelmenu=1

I run a point-to-point link (what is called an AdHoc connection) between my laptop and my server.

My P2120 laptop has a built in 802.11 card. For my server I have a cheapo XH1153 Dick Smith USB-802.11 adaptor.

The Server Side

http://linuxsoftware.co.nz/xh1153.jpg
I bought this little thing ages ago. Thinking about getting a proper 802.11g wireless router. The Fedora Core 1 kernel included the at76c503a driver, but nowadays you need to download it compile and install it yourself. In /etc/modules.conf I have

options at76c503-rfmd netdev_name=eth%d

This causes the driver to call the device eth2 which I can configure using redhat-config-network. Server802.11Config.

If you don't have Fedora you may like to look at these scripts

• server-won
  

• server-woff
  

• laptop-won
  

• laptop-woff
  

The Laptop Side

http://linuxsoftware.co.nz/laptop_p2120.jpg
The P2120 has a built-in Wireless-LAN (802.11b) interface which is supported by the Orinoco Linux wireless driver.

Only problem I have is sometimes the interface appears as eth1 and sometimes as eth0, depending on if I'm also connected to a wired network. To handle this my scripts on the laptop take the interface name as a parameter. Ralph says I should create a kernel patch to control setting the interface name.

For security my link is WEP encrypted and tunnelled through SSH. Probably unnecessary overkill, but it works and doesn't seem any slower.

More info:

• Wireless Tools for Linux

• Wireless on Linux - Part 1

• The linux-wlan(tm) Project

• Link-sys WPC11 Mini-HOWTO

Things to do:

• Try kismet

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