Random WIFI questions

[ookabooka]

Ok, im gettin a laptop for college soon, and it makes sense to harness its wireless abilities to access internet anywhere in my house. I do not,however, want to get a router, i want to get a PCI card and toss it into my sparc workstation that functions as my router. I am totally unfamiliar on how WIFI works, is it just like a network on one giant hub? In which case my computer/router could easily be configured to host the net to my laptop (as well as forward to my local intranet) or would i need to get a hardware router because PCI cards act like clients, while hardware routers act like servers. Security is of mild concern, i could easily set my router to only allow access to a certain MAC address, and anything important would be encrypted (forward vnc through ssh). My apologies for dumb questions, i am just unfortunately unfamiliar with the technology. I do know however, that a pringles can is the perfect resonance chamber for the frequency WIFI operates on and makes a great semi-driectional antanna.

 

[chittnp]

if you have a computer that you're going to using as a router and install a wifi card onto it, it should still function in the same manner, just without the CAT 5 cable in between. it uses the same TCP/IP protocol that a wired connection does. as for the client server relationship, Im fairly certain that you determine that in your network settings, when the you are setting up the wireless connection it asks what kind of relationship you wan to set up, dont pick "ad-hoc", which is for connecting two laptops (for example) to each other. If you planning on running a unix based OS on your laptop, and your laptop has a built in wireless card (usually mini PCI) , make sure your laptop manufacturer can provide you with drivers that support unix/linux..whatever...alot of them dont but youcan usually find a driver that works somewhere on the web. as for security, get a card that supports WPA and the appropriate software, and enable mac filtering (dunno what you call it with your set up, but on my router its called mac filtering) Change the default ssid, disable ssid broadcast, change the default admin passwords and thats about as secure as you can get. as I understand it, enabling a VPN tunnel adds more security, but sacrifices performance. Im not sure how to set it all up using another computer, or what software you need. And a pringles can isnt exactly ideal, but can be made into a tolerable directional antenna for less than $10