At 06:58 AM 2/12/2004, Dany Nativel wrote:
>On a Soekris board (4501 in my case), is there any advantage of using a 
>mini-PCI WLAN card over an external WLAN AP connected through one of the 
>ethernet port ?

That's one I'm still playing with.  I've got a net4501 with a Prism-based 
miniPCI card (from Netgate).  It seems that sending anything like a 
continuous stream of data over the wireless side of the world (like running 
software update on my Mac iBook) will wedge it solid.  No response to 
wireless, nor wired interfaces (even the console).  Power cycle is only option.

I believe the wi driver must be doing a lot of work with interrupts 
disabled on each packet, and the 4501 runs out of CPU for user-land.

A net4801 might fix that, just because it is faster.

I have had much better luck with a cheap SMC WAP (SMC 2655W) connected to 
the DMZ port, and I also get MAC level filtering to boot.

But I'm stubborn, and after spending the money for the wireless radio, and 
spending an afternoon drilling holes in the Soekris case for the antenna, 
I'm going to try to fix the problem with traffic shaping on the wireless 
segment.  I'll let everyone know how that works out.

By the way, I rebuilt my bp27 image to put the watchdog back in.  At least 
I don't have to crawl under the table to cycle the power on my box.  Just 
wait about a half minute and it comes back.  I tried to convince Manuel to 
leave it in (hint-hint), but apparently people prefer to have their box go 
flakey when overloaded than to cleanly restart.

         -crl
--
Chad R. Larson (CRL22)    chad at eldocomp dot com
   Eldorado Computing, Inc.   602-604-3100
      5353 North 16th Street, Suite 400
        Phoenix, Arizona   85016-3228

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