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As some may have seen from my facebook status, my wireless at home has been pissing me off, something chronic. My first RDF-addled response was to say "screw it, I'm buying two Airport Extremes and going 802.11n". Cooler heads prevailed (thanks Elizabeth :D) and held me and my $440 back.
I set up my old friend Smokeping and it soon became clear that my wireless was all over the place, like, really bad, and in all likelihood, had been for quite some number of years. A small amount of pondering and research later, and I changed the bridge downstairs from an Airport Express to a Linksys WRT54G running the Linux based DD-WRT firmware. I also took this opportunity to flash the upstairs Linksys WRT54G from Sveasoft Satori to DD-WRT.
I set up Client-bridge mode on the downstairs one, and I now have a shiny WPA protected network, with the bridge running at 54Mbit. Mmm. This means if you've got our network set up in your laptop, you will need to change it from WEP to WPA. The key is still the same though.
After checking everything was working, Smokeping is reporting much lower and smoother pings, which presumably means there's less crap on the wireless, so everything is now right in the world. Somewhat surprisingly, even the throughput to my laptop has got better too, which means that the Airport Express must have been screwing everything up. It's also not playing Music anymore, which I need to look into, but that one at least can be sorted out without network downtime.
Finally though, DD-WRT has come along leaps and bounds since I played with it in 2005/2006. It now has a really slick web interface, and lots of new and useful configuration options. Of course, since I'm now using my spare Access Point, I need another Linux-capable WRT54G for my definitive hardware list contingency spares (mm ITIL), but they seem to only be about $90 on ebay.
Anyway, in short: wireless was broken, now it's not and yay well supoorted open source software.
I set up my old friend Smokeping and it soon became clear that my wireless was all over the place, like, really bad, and in all likelihood, had been for quite some number of years. A small amount of pondering and research later, and I changed the bridge downstairs from an Airport Express to a Linksys WRT54G running the Linux based DD-WRT firmware. I also took this opportunity to flash the upstairs Linksys WRT54G from Sveasoft Satori to DD-WRT.
I set up Client-bridge mode on the downstairs one, and I now have a shiny WPA protected network, with the bridge running at 54Mbit. Mmm. This means if you've got our network set up in your laptop, you will need to change it from WEP to WPA. The key is still the same though.
After checking everything was working, Smokeping is reporting much lower and smoother pings, which presumably means there's less crap on the wireless, so everything is now right in the world. Somewhat surprisingly, even the throughput to my laptop has got better too, which means that the Airport Express must have been screwing everything up. It's also not playing Music anymore, which I need to look into, but that one at least can be sorted out without network downtime.
Finally though, DD-WRT has come along leaps and bounds since I played with it in 2005/2006. It now has a really slick web interface, and lots of new and useful configuration options. Of course, since I'm now using my spare Access Point, I need another Linux-capable WRT54G for my definitive hardware list contingency spares (mm ITIL), but they seem to only be about $90 on ebay.
Anyway, in short: wireless was broken, now it's not and yay well supoorted open source software.
