[clue-tech] Wi-Fi router recommendations?

[Jim Ockers]

Hi Peter,

> David L. Anselmi wrote:
> > Are there any other wireless routers worth 
> > considering?  Either because they also can run a custom Linux install, 
> > or they offer better price/performance, or they have useful features 
> > (magic bridging, better security protocol support, etc.)?
> 
> I have had really good luck with the Belkin routers that are sold at 
> Wal-Mart and Micro Center for $40.  They do Ethernet bridging.  That's 
> good because you can plug your Linux machine's Ethernet NIC into the 
> router and not have to worry about any wireless config on the Linux 
> side.  From the Linux box's point of view it just sees Ethernet.
> 
> Because the bridging is proprietary you will need 2 of these devices to 
> do it, one for the Linux machine and one connected to the network.  The 
> one down side is that there is some instability in the router that will 
> demand a power cycle every 2 weeks or so.  This seems to be aggravated 
> by having a lot of connections open, so it may just be running out of 
> RAM trying to track the state of all of those connections.  Or it could 
> have a memory leak, or a hundred other things.  But it's easy enough to 
> power cycle that I don't mind living with it.

That doesn't sound quite right.  Unless you have hundreds of machines on
one or both sides of the bridge I don't think it should fail that way.

Are you sure it's not just doing proxy ARP for IP addresses on the other
side of the bridge?  When you look at the ARP table (cat /proc/net/arp
or /sbin/arp -an) is the same MAC address repeated in the list for a number
of IP addresses?  And is it the MAC address of the wireless bridge?

There are generally 2 ways to do a wireless ethernet bridge, the easy/
cheap way and the hard/right way.  The easy/cheap way is to do proxy
ARP and have a routing table inside the bridge device to forward packets
to the other side of the "bridge."  This is not a true ethernet bridge.
And, I'm guessing it would be subject to failure in the way you describe.

The hard/right way to do it is to have a true ethernet bridge but many
vendors are not clever enough to get their software to actually work this
way...

-- 
Jim Ockers, P.Eng. (ockers at ockers.net)
Contact info: please see http://www.ockers.net/