June 19, 2005

Wireless Networking with LinkSys and Asus

Wireless Networking with LinkSys and Asus

When I installed a computer for my wife in her study, I connected her PC with a long 10baseT ethernet cable. I was to lazy to put the cable out of sight, so whenever she wanted to browse the Internet we had a cable through the house.

After some failed peer to peer Wireless attempts I was reluctant to start over again to get things to work, but after some reassurance I finally found out that a Access Point was needed to get things working. I asked a friend running around in the south to bring me an Wifi Access Point Router.

He brought me a Wireless Broadband Router, the WRT54G by Cisco - Linksys, and unfortunately I don’t have broadband… But the Linksys WRT54G can be used as an Wireless Accesspoint without the broadband connection as well.

I use one PC as Central Dial-Up PC, by means of Windows XP Internet Sharing. My guess is that this is some sort of native XP NAT.

This configuration showed the limitations of the Linksys WRT54G DHCP server, it can only assign the build in router to DHCP clients, and not my Dial-Up PC. And I need to assign the Dial-Up PC’s IP address to allow occasional guest connections to the internet.

Freeware DHCP servers for Windows XP are difficult to find, but I found one, just one…

Download : Freeware DHCP server for Windows XP

Actually the above program can do a lot more, but I just need the DHCP server..

For my wifes PC I use an Asus WL-167G USB 2.0 WLAN adapter, and after installing it (using Windows XP native WLAN support) I immediatly had a 54Mbps wireless lan connection with the Linksys WRT54G.

After entering the right IP addresses here and there I could easily connect with PC Anywhere to her computer, and wireless sufing the Internet from her PC was no problem.

Filesharing was a different story however… Larger files did not want to go over the WLAN connection, time outs and a message “NETWORK NAME could not be found”. I suspected that routing was a problem somehow, and looked into that, but did not find a solution.

I stumbled on http://www.linksysinfo.org/index.php, a whole site dedicated to Linksys products, and found people with the same problem. (I have a version 2.2 of the router)

A (beta) firmware update solved the large file transfer problem, at least until now… download at the above site..

(BTW, during my registration I saw the title of the site change into “This Site Is Hacked”, I hope nothing serious will be lost)

Related Links:

Linksys Wireless Router

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