Need a little guidence setting up a wireless fileserver???

southpaw

First of all I'm trying to figure out if this is even possible/worth it. What I mean is this;

*I have broadband internet access at home via cable modem provided by Road Runner...
*I have a Linksys WRT54G wireless/ethernet router, which has 4 ethernet ports and 2 wireless ports at my disposal...
*I also have an older Linksys BEFSR41 4 port ethernet router/switch, which is not being used...
*I have 4 desktops and 1 laptop, of which the laptop is using one of the wireless ports and one of the desktops is using a wired ethernet port...
*The other 3 desktops work and each have an available ethernet port, 1 of these 3 desktops also has a wireless pci card (Linksys WMP54G)...

And those are the players, so what I am trying to figure out is can I set up one of the desktops, the one with the wireless pci card and an ethernet card, as a fileserver for my other two desktops and laptop with what I've got???

As a sidenote, the 4th desktop is my brothers and it's hooked up to the router in his room with the modem...
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John R. Graham · Posted: Sat May 27, 2006 2:33 am Post subject:

If I understand you correctly, your computers are all hooked up to your LAN, either in a wired fashion or a wireless fashion. The LAN is provided by the built-in hub/switch in the router and the router also provides a connection to the Internet via the Roadrunner cable modem.

So, you have a garden variety home LAN (very similar to that I have, by the way) and you want to know whether or not a computer on the LAN can be a server on the LAN?

The simple answer would appear to be yes. What am I missing? The other three desktop machines are currently not hooked to the router, right? Well, hook 'em up! Make 'em part of the LAN and one (or more) of them can be a server.

Again, what am I missing?

- John

quinn_jones · Posted: Sat May 27, 2006 2:36 am Post subject:

Seems to me that the medium doesn't matter - if you actually have the wireless working together then you're good to go. You only need one interface (wireless or wired) for the file server because it should be able to talk to all other nodes (thanks to your router). Save the wireless card for something else.

Be sure that you've read up on wireless security (configuring the machines for WPA or, better yet, set up some security independent of the wireless like VPN tunnels or SSH, possibly limiting MAC addresses on the router too) before you turn all this on, otherwise the world will be able to use your fileserver as long as they're within a few hundred feet of your house.

southpaw · Posted: Sat May 27, 2006 4:03 am Post subject:

Okay, so in a nutshell the answer is in fact yes

One of the issues that I'm looking at right now is compatability with my Linksys wireless pci card, there doesn't seem to be any???
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southpaw · Posted: Sat May 27, 2006 9:52 pm Post subject:

Okay, so after a little research (searching the forums googling etc..etc..) I have come to the conclusion that the pci card that I'm using (Linksys WMP54G) uses a Ralink 25xx series chipset, which apparently seems to be a very popular chipset. Unfortunately, I believe this is about as close to a solution as I can find

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-416605-highlight-wmp54g.html

So now, of course I have a couple of decisions to make

....
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