[Info-vax] Wireless networking for my home xp900

[John Wallace]

On Aug 17, 4:35 pm, Jojimbo <jjgessl... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Due to some residential reorganization, my xp900 will be moving
> further away from the network hub.  This will make having an actual
> wire very inconvenient for network connectivity.  Is there some device
> I can use to let the xp900 join my already established wireless net?
> Any suggestions appreciated.
>
> Thanks,  Jim

You've already got an existing Access Point (AP) so I'm not sure about
Ian's suggestion you need another AP.

I've just abandoned powerline networking. The kit I had, some Zyxel or
other, suffered excessive packet loss between upstairs and downstairs.
As I understand it, there are very few chipsets which do this
powerline game, and they just modulate Ethernet packets onto the mains
wires, with no additional error checking and correction, in particular
no forward error correction. Thus if the received signal is poor, bits
are corrupted and therefore packets will be lost, which leads to
retransmission delays with TCP, and to completely lost data with UDP.
Web browsing was lumpy, DNS requests would fail (DNS = 3 retries
only?) and I couldn't make VNC connections stay up very long, for
example. You may have better luck,  but based on my experience I'm not
recommending it. Because it's not doing anything IP-oriented it may
offer the chance to use non-IP stuff such as DECnet, LAT, clusters,
etc.

The reason I had the little powerline network was to connect the LAN
switch in the upstairs workroom with the AP/router connecting to the
outside world. Prior to the powerline I had a Linksys "Wireless
Ethernet Transceiver" WET11 connecting the upstairs switch to the
downstairs router. It had ye olde security (WEP not WPA) which is why
I wanted it replaced.

I still need a WET11 replacement. What I'll be looking for, what you
might want to look at too if your needs are IP-only, is a "wireless
Ethernet transceiver" - one which connects transparently via a LAN
cable and needs no drivers, such as have been used with game boxes or
whatever in the days when they had LAN ports but not built in WLAN. As
Richard points out, anything which needs USB (ie all the cheap stuff!)
is useless in this picture.

A slightly more upmarket option would be a switch/router/AP or similar
which can be set to act as an "Access Point Client" (aka AP client).
At the moment it's not top of my ToDo list so I don't have any names
yet other than Linksys WAP54G, which won't go down well with some
folks round here, and anyway afaik there's no guarantee that AP Client
mode works across different vendors, ie  a Linksys AP Client may not
with your existing Netgear AP (even if, as is often the case, the
electronics inside is very similar).

If you need to pass IP traffic, there's also the possible issue of
whether your shortlisted kit can cope with it (arguably it should if
it meets the 802.11 specs, but who ever bothers with specs so long as
it works with Windows most of the time...).

Anyone able to shed more light on stuff for this which does work OK
with non-IP traffic?