Most 802.11g cards allow only Managed or Ad-Hoc modes. With the hostap Linux driver for Prism based wireless cards, the Master mode becomes available, allowing to run your own access point. I now have my central box (babaracus) as an access-point and the client laptops in Managed mode. This has severly increased throughput as I could usually only manage less than 1Mb but now can utilise the full 11. Using the userspace hostapd you can do clever things like Radius authentication and dynamic WEP keys, but I’ve not played with that yet. I’ve had a few problems (lock ups on an SMP and loss of clients after restarting the AP) but it’s early days yet.
Tag: wep
Remote wireless X clients
I’ve setup and old Pentium 100 Toshiba laptop with a wireless card and Debian as a “dumb-ish X terminal” at home over my 802.11b wireless network. It works rather well and very quiet. My girlfriend now has all the wonders that RedHat 9 brings, without having to lug a big heavy expensive power-hungry laptop around the house. Up until now I’d had a hacky ssh remote session thing running, but now I use XDMCP (X -probe IP) to login directly using gdm listening on the central box. A firewall attempts to protect the XDMCP and X11 services, with minimal privacy provided by WEP. I’ll have IPSEC implemented soon enough though.
I’m also working on a fail over redundant MySQL cluster setup at the moment and hope to write a quick HOWTO on it, covering Heartbeat and MySQL 4’s replication system. I’ll announce it here as usual.