Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2004 16:36:17 +1100 From: Daniel Hyde <daniel.hyde@gmail.com> To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: 802.11g pci card recommendations? Message-ID: <c7f6f0f20412012136408fe059@mail.gmail.com>
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Hi all, I'm setting up an 802.11g wireless network at home and I'm looking for a suitable pci card for my i386 machine. I'm new to wireless networking and, to some extent, networking in general, so I want to make this as painless as possible -- by buying the right hardware in the first place! So. I'm looking for recommendations from other 802.11g users. What cards have you found to work well? What should I avoid like the plague? Anything in particular I should look for when purchasing a card? Etc. The machine will be acting only as a client, not as an access point. It currently has onboard gigabit ethernet, but I'm going for wireless for the convenience of not having to lay cable (rented house). The ethernet is currently configured and works (/dev/sk0) -- will this play nice with the wireless as long as the ethernet is physically disconnected from the network, or will I need to do funky things with ifconfig in order to switch back and forth (should the need arise)? It's currently running an almost fresh install of 5.3-release. I'll probably end up tracking -stable once I've finished playing with the network. I'm thinking of going for a card supporting WPA encryption for forward compatibility. My gateway/router supports both WPA and WEP; however my flatmate's card supports only WEP. Thus, at this point in time, WPA support on my card is somewhat redundant in that its benefits will basically be eliminated by running the gateway in a WEP-compatible mode. My flatmate's card is a NetGear WG311 v2. Up until last night I was expecting I'd probably get one of these, since the WG311 is listed on the supported hardware page. Then we discovered that the v2 is based on a different chipset that is not compatible with the ath driver! (Why, oh why did they not change the model number when they changed the chipset?) So, now I'm not quite game to just buy a card and hope for the best: I'd like to know before I purchase what's going to work and what's not. Any recommendations or general advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Daniel
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