[Info-vax] Wireless networking for my home xp900

[John Wallace]

On Aug 17, 7:53 pm, John Wallace <johnwalla... at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> 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?

Doh. Obviously that should have said "if you need to pass *non*-IP
traffic. Sorry.