[TriLUG] [OT] Setting up a home wireless network

[Tanner Lovelace]

On Sun, 2002-12-15 at 13:06, Andrew Perrin wrote:
> Any recommendatinos on sources for home wireless setup? My situation is
> that I've got an existing, wired network in the study consisting of three
> desktop computers (two debian, one of which acts as the firewall/iptables
> router, and one Win98) and one laptop. I want the laptop to go wireless,
> and it's got a working wireless card which I've successfully used on the
> UNC campus's wireless network.  I bought a WAP (Belkin) to use for the
> home network. The question is... what's the right way to set it up? It
> defaults to an IP address of 192.168.0.254 which is fine by me since the
> other machines on the home network are 192.168.0.[3..14]. But how do I set
> up the laptop and WAP so that packets from the laptop wind their way
> through the WAP, then through the router/firewall machine?  Setting the
> gateway to either 192.168.0.254 (the WAP) or 192.168.0.3 (the router
> machine) doesn't seem to work.


Andrew,

I have this same WAP (the Belkin) and all I did was plug it
in and configure the ESSID.  (Unfortunately, the Belkin must
be configured from a windows machine, but that's what vmware 
is for. :-).  I've got a dhcp server on my internal network
and my wireless laptop gets its information from that.  The
gateway should definitely be your normal router.  The only 
reason the WAP has an ip address is for management functions.
If that doesn't work, make sure you can ping various machines
in your local network (behind the firewall).  Then, try
pinging machines outside the network.  It could be that
your name server isn't setup correctly.  If that still
doesn't work, make sure you have the wireless-tools rpm 
(assuming you're using redhat, if not, try this website:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Tools.html)
and try the iwconfig program.  It should tell you what
WAP you're associating with and what your ESSID is.  I've
run into problems sometimes when my laptop tries to
associate with my neighbor's WAP, so it might be something
like that too.

Good luck,
Tanner
-- 
Tanner Lovelace | lovelace at wayfarer.org | http://wtl.wayfarer.org/
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