[TriLUG] [OT] Setting up a home wireless network

[Greg Brown]

Is your Belkin AP new or has someone configured it previously?  If both 
the card and AP are new then you shouldn't have to do much past 
slapping the card in to the laptop and powering up the Belkin in order 
to get them both to communicate.  In nearly every case (and the Belkin 
is one AP I've never played with) the Access Point is a layer two 
device.  Therefore you shouldn't have to set your gateway on your 
laptop to anything besides what the other devices are set to.  From 
here on out we'll assume that your Belkin is a layer two device and not 
a wireless router (layer three).

There are some things that you have to have set on both the AP and the 
laptop in order for these devices to communicate.  They are:

1. the SSID (a.k.a ESSID, a.k.a "network name")
2. the WEP key

Telnet (or web, or whatever is supported) and gain access to the 
configuration on the Belkin device.  Once you are in the belkin turn 
the SSID broadcast to "on", if it isn't already, and remove any WEP 
keys.  The SSID broadcast could also labeled something like "keep 
network private" or something like that.  On your laptop remove any 
existing SSID that might have been configured previously.  Once the WEP 
keys have bee cleared out of both the AP and the configuration on the 
card in your laptop your laptop should see the AP and sych right up.

If it STILL doesn't work you might have a bad access point.

You can also download netstumbler (for windows) or wellenreiter  (for 
Linux) and sniff out the configuration of the AP in most  cases if 
nothing seems to work.

Once you get the card and the AP to communicate then it's time to go 
back and turn the SSID of, set a new SSID, and turn on WEP so you'll 
have the most secure wireless network as is possible.

Greg


On Sunday, Dec 15, 2002, at 13:06 America/New_York, Andrew Perrin wrote:

> Any recommendatinos on sources for home wireless setup? My situation is
> that I've got an existing, wired network in the study consisting of 
> three
> desktop computers (two debian, one of which acts as the 
> firewall/iptables
> router, and one Win98) and one laptop. I want the laptop to go 
> wireless,
> and it's got a working wireless card which I've successfully used on 
> the
> UNC campus's wireless network.  I bought a WAP (Belkin) to use for the
> home network. The question is... what's the right way to set it up? It
> defaults to an IP address of 192.168.0.254 which is fine by me since 
> the
> other machines on the home network are 192.168.0.[3..14]. But how do I 
> set
> up the laptop and WAP so that packets from the laptop wind their way
> through the WAP, then through the router/firewall machine?  Setting the
> gateway to either 192.168.0.254 (the WAP) or 192.168.0.3 (the router
> machine) doesn't seem to work.
>
> Thanks for any advice.
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Andrew J Perrin - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
> Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
> clists at perrin.socsci.unc.edu * andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu
>
>
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