Wireless "rangemax" for college dorm!

jmacina

I never messed around with wireless, but college is making me take a nice look at it so I can route an ADSL connection for 4 or 5 apartments. Since drilling holes and using standard ethernet cables and a wired router isn't viable or allowed acording to the land lord I thought that wireless could save me. But I never seen it in action.

I am afraid that the signal will not be strong enough to go through some walls and make my purcahse of the wireless router and wifi cards a HUGE waste of cash. what I did was take a standard 900mhz cordless phone that stays in my dorm ( since the router would stay in my dorm as well) and went to each apartment to see if I could get a good signal to dial a number. In every apartment I got good reception, but I don't know if that means that I would get good reception with wireless internet. Can somebody help me with this? Is there any way Ic an check this without having to buy the hardware or borrow someones and test it in my aprtment building?

Another question is if I would be going the right way in choosing netgear's rangemax technology. Most of the PC's would be running windows XP , but I would like to go back to using Gentoo (since I am on dial-up right now =( , did anyone get rangemax working on Gentoo.

Thanks ,

d4rkwingduck · Posted: Wed Apr 19, 2006 5:33 am Post subject:

I like your idea of the 900MHz phone test hehe

. Anyways 802.11b/g(which i'm thinking you will most likely be getting) wireless works at 2.4GHz so the amount of attenuation on the radio signal by the walls will be different than that of the telephone, which may mean that at the 5th room that person may not get the signal at all or still manage to connect to the access point but at a lower usualable datarate(which may not be a problem). Also the thickness of the wall and the material used in its contruction will determine the amount of signal loss received and other factors such as how much the spectrum is populated with other wireless network / devices operating in the range is present in the vicinity.
So what you need to do is get someone who has wireless gears. Either an access point and a laptop with a pcmcia card and then do the site survey as you did with the phone using the laptop. If you can maintain a connection in the 5th room then all is good. You may want to consider buying directional antennas so as to force the energy of the waves in the direction of the apartments. Overall however i think you should have no problem as i did do a site survey assignment once where the layout of the floor was pretty much like your's. If all of this works another issue that you should pay close attention to is security DO NOT NEGLECT THAT, don't just enable WEP and think that's good enough do some research on wireless security there are loads of papers/guides/tips and tricks out there that will help you get your setup secure enough.

Monkeh · Veteran Joined: 06 Aug 2005 Posts: 1656 Location: England

Afaik, the rangemax cards use Atheros chipsets, which are Linux native. However, if you're going to be putting a lot of traffic through a Rangemax router, well, don't buy a Rangemax router. They easily overheat.

jmacina · Posted: Wed Apr 19, 2006 4:35 pm Post subject:

Monkeh · Veteran Joined: 06 Aug 2005 Posts: 1656 Location: England

I don't recommend any router. I'm allergic to consumer products.

However, a friend of mine got a Rangemax, it overheated doing about 100kb/sec.

wizard69 · Apprentice Joined: 22 Sep 2003 Posts: 178 Location: Berlin

Have a look at linksys routers linux can be installed on most of them accept the newst models

http://www.linksysinfo.org/

http://www.thibor.co.uk/

and one of the features that comes with the new firmware is "Adjustment of transmit power of wireless LAN" so you can increase the distance of the wireless lan or you can buy a stronger antenna. And as kel mentioned look in to security WPA2 with AES or TKIP is a good choice.

syg00 · Posted: Thu Apr 20, 2006 12:29 pm Post subject:

I used to run an old D-Link wireless router plus a repeater (which I've had for years) to get access around my place.
Recently both died, so I got a Linksys WRT54GX. I now get *twice* the range. Passes through all the walls, and the metal shed up the back yard when I tested it. And that was with an old Cisco aironet 350 11b (yes b !!!) card.

Modern equipment is awesome - just do it.

jmacina · Posted: Thu Apr 20, 2006 1:33 pm Post subject:

syg00 · Posted: Thu Apr 20, 2006 2:01 pm Post subject:

Signal has to pass through at least 2 brick external walls when I'm pulling mail up the back yard - up to 4 depending on which tree I'm sitting under.
And I'm talking 30-odd metres.

No guarentees, but if I was you I'd stop worrying.