Wireless on Linux, Part 1 – Guide
For the harassed and overworked network administrator, connecting clients without having to rewire is so much fun it feels wrong. Carla Schroder shows Linux administrators how they too can participate in the festivities. For the harassed and overworked network administrator, connecting new clients without the need for additional cabling is so much fun it feels wrong. Miles of beautiful color-coded cables and labels are aesthetically pleasing and useful, of course, and who has never had the satisfaction of crimping them? There’s nothing quite like the authorized SNICK of a perfect crimp. (For some of us geeks who are stuck at the table, gripping is all we have.) But rasslin bales of CAT5 cables have been like that in the last millennium. Desperately old-fashioned. Square, even. And wireless Ethernet is nothing new: it’s affordable and works flawlessly. Today we’re going to take a look at which brands and devices work on Linux; next week, we’ll dive into the deep and mysterious world of chipsets, configurations, and troubleshooting.
Security and drivers, or lack of them
Wireless has a glaring pitfall, however – security. And then there’s the usual Linux trap – finding compatible hardware. Let’s take a moment to point fingers of shameful disapproval at hardware vendors that don’t provide Linux drivers for their products. Don’t joke to me about not being interested enough; there is certainly a substantial market for Linux – and Unix / BSD / Mac OS X -. How do vendors think all those millions of Linux machines are networked together? Magic? And Unix was the great networking operating system decades before Windows was born. And get this – there is a large group of talented volunteer programmers who work tirelessly to write Linux device drivers, often without the cooperation of hardware manufacturers, who apparently don’t even want to take advantage of this incredible pool of free work by releasing specs. Shame, shame, shame for these manufacturers. None of the traps are insurmountable, just irritating and, in the case of drivers, inexcusable. Let’s start by looking at hardware selection. But first, a tip: don’t be shy about returning products that don’t work well. The world of wireless chipsets is a chaotic hodgepodge – a single model line can have any number of different chipsets. Firmware revisions are apparently randomly assigned to chipsets, which causes variations in the features and performance. Since most vendors place the responsibility for determining Linux compatibility on the customer and offer little or no assistance, which is difficult for them; keep returning products until they work well.
wireless protocols
The first choice is which wireless protocol? There are currently three options: 802.11b, 802.11a and 802.11g. Some devices come with multimode support, but only one of these protocols is compatible with any of the others – 802.11g is compatible with 802.11b. My current recommendation is 802.11b as these products are the best supported on Linux. However, 802.11b is rated the slowest, with a theoretical rate of 11 megabits per second. Here is a quick comparison of the three protocols: Note the ‘theoretical’ prior to the above rated speeds. This is because real-world performance will be half to two-thirds of rated speeds, as there is a certain amount of TCP overhead, just like with wired networks, plus interference from walls and other things, and greater distance is always equal to minus Speed. In another words, don’t worry when your new wireless connection only delivers 5-7 Mbps (802.11b) or 20-30 Mbps (802.11g / a) – that’s the way it is. Another factor is the number of users per access point, as in the case of wireless, it is shared bandwidth, so more users means slower performance.
Adding Wireless to Wired Easily and Cheaply
Adding a wireless node to a wired Ethernet is simple, at least in theory: install and configure an access point somewhere on the LAN, then install and configure a wireless NIC on the client machine and then voila, you’re connected! And sometimes it even works that way. Newer Linux distributions such as Red Hat 9, Mandrake 9, Lindows 4 and SuSE 8.1 automatically recognize and install drivers for wireless network cards. All you have to do is configure the network settings. Lindows has a handy page listing all the wireless NICs that work with it, as well as some that don’t; this list should apply to any Linux. You don’t need a lot of fancy paste; just buy a Linksys WAP11 for about $90 and a Linksys WMP11 (for desktops) or a WPC11 (for notebooks) for about $60. Plug them in, configure them, and you’re done. Of course, there are other brands that work very well and that are also reasonably priced. I mention Linksys simply because that’s what I’m most familiar with. All the usual suspects – D-Link, NetGear, SMC – have 802.11b Linux-compatible devices, and any 802.11b WAP that uses browser-based configuration should work with Linux. On your wireless base station shopping trips, you’ll see all sorts of sleek, stylish devices like the Apple AirPort or the Linksys WAP54G. These are 802.11g wireless access points, meaning they work with 802.11g and 802.11b NICs. Triple-mode wireless access points that support 802.11b, 802.11g and 802.11a are also becoming available, as are triple-mode NICs.
Final note
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