Setting up a Wireless LAN ... not so easy

[Darth Garth]

I have a Netgear DG834 (non wireless) DSL router/modem so my plan was to buy two Belkin Pre-N PCI cards and shove one into my PC and bridge that to my DSL connection and then shove the other one into my daughter's PC and let that connect to my PC via the magic of Pre-N to get on the Internet.

I then found out that you just can't put a wireless card in your PC and then turn it into a wireless access point by using XP .

There is some software available on Linux and something commercial from a vendor called PCTEL but I wonder how good and stable it is and how much CPU suckage it will incur.

Odd that the vendors did not think of something like this when they defined the WiFi standards.

 

[ebendl]

Perhaps I understand wrongly, but can't you just create an ad-hoc network? Don't need an access point for one of those.

 

[Darth Garth]

Thanks a million ebendl !!!!.
That is exactly what I want ... pretty new to WiFi so I don't understand all the terminology.

I found this link and will try it out

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/networking/expert/bowman_02april08.mspx

Thanks again.

 

[ScrnScrm]

tibby - please make sure that you still set the security up properly! Adhoc networks are the easiest to crack without security. if you are new to it, its very easy to make mistakes. at min, you should be using encryption (128k) and hiding the SSID...

 

[TheRoDent]

...at min, you should be using encryption (128k)

Yes.

and hiding the SSID...

Hiding the ESSID does jacksh1t. The moment one party starts talking on a channel with an SSID, it's immediately "unhidden". Forget about hiding SSID's and all the crap you may read elsewhere. Hiding SSID broadcasts makes for about 2 seconds more work for anyone wanting to break your network.