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

[Rodent of Unusual Size]

as all here know, i have hardly a network nor a hardware maven.  however,
even i managed to set up a wifi lan at home with relatively little pain.

i bought an apple airport for my base station.  my home hard lan looks
something like this:

				[linux box]	   [d-link 10/100 switch]
telocity/directv/dsl-du-jour ===[with two ]=========+    |    |    |
				[nics     ]		 |    |    +=====  various
							/     +==========  systems
                                         [ apple ]     /
					 [airport]====+
				         [ (snow)]

the dual-nic linux box acts as my firewall on the outer nic, and dhcp server
and router on the inner nic.  the airport has a hard-assigned ipa, and is
configured to act as a transparent bridge (no dhcp, no nat).

my various wireless card macs are registered in the dhcpd.conf file, so they
pick up predictable addresses.  the airport *could* restrict access to specific
macas, but i don't have that set up right now.  i run encryption at home;
my laptops are set up such that a wireless card in slot 0 uses encryption,
while it doesn't if it's in slot 1.

the hardest part of the whole bit was getting the laptop side of things working,
since i have multiple types of wireless cards.

fwiw, i wrote summat about this at <url:http://Ken.Coar.Org/musings/AirPort.html>.