Monday, October 31, 2005

My house: Bachelor pad + WiFi hotspot

Why bachelor pad? well, I'm not saying anything about that here. Those who were present will know :p
Wifi hotspot ? Its obv. only for me, so hotspot isnt really the right word. Lets just call it the Zone(2). Coz Zone(1) is another place.(read: tapri near my place, where we hang out for "coffee").So, I bought this and it has arrived ! Woohoo !!
Its really sweet, extremely compact, and packs a whole bunch of features like 802.11g , has mixed mode too, wpa, wpa2, firewalls, 4 port switch, and shit loads of admin. stuff. I already had the BSNL dataone 256kbps modem, so all I did was hook it up to the AP, configure it for auto-dial, and route it through the AP, to the clients through dhcp. So, all I need to do is just power it ON, and voila, we have Wifi ! Since its soo compact, my guess is that Linksys must have used a standard mini-pci card in there, with its own antenna. So, there's no pointy black things sticking out of it, although if you need range big time, they've got another slot which is nicely hidden away, for attaching another antenna. So, all in all, its pretty neat, I get really good connectivity throughout the house. On the terrace, its a little problem, I need to place the AP near the window to get range. Actually, I think its because of the encryption mode, and power saving mode on the laptop. I get 55% sig. strength, but I cant ping. So, putting it in Open mode, should do the trick. With WPA , the shared key is reset every (configurable) ms. So, some bandwidth goes in that itself, to keep the connection alive. Also, powersaving mode, keeps the Tx off , and is alive only in the recv. mode after some intervals( like reduced bandwidth usage). So, time is spent in kicking the transmitter out of sleep. Therefore, perhaps, there's some packet loss in there, and causes for timeouts and retries. Anyway, its working really fine now, and I'm having a great time !

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