Wireless Ethernet All-In-One Kits

Hello All

I'm about to install two Rio Receivers in the house. I am going to run cat 5 cable for now but I would like to explore a wireless set up for the near future. I have seen that some companies (like Linksys) have "ethernet-in-a-box" kits for the home. I have not found any that have wireless kits however.

Is anyone aware of a decent system I could use to set this up? I am looking basically for a wireless network card for the PC, a hub/router and two standalones for the receivers....

Thanks -

I've learned from experience that the Linksys 802.11 cards will only talk to the Linksys-brand base stations properly. So if possible, I'd try to find a system using Lucent or Orinoco cards rather than Linksys, those will be more universally interoperable.

DLink makes kits. See here. You're going to run into a (money) problem with making the RioReceivers wireless. Orinoco Ethernet Converters seem to be the easiest way to make a wireless Receiver. See my install here. Unfortunately, the Orinoco EC costs about $300 US.

Yikes!

Maybe I'll put it on the back burner for a while then...$300 US is like $10,000 Canadian....

Seriously though, thanks for your suggestions

I work for a mid-sized ISP in the Midwest. We have a ton of ethernet converters around, we were fortunate enough to be one of our initial testers on this product, and have a few extra at work. I can let 2 go for $300 if you are interested. There are also USB converters for the Orinoco cards that will give you a usb hookup from a wireless card. Those are a little pricy as well though. Just let me know.

I've learned that a lot also depends on your OS, XP (I know lots of us hate it) actually has built in wireless support meaning that my high rate IBM cards work with my D-link DWL-1000 great, however in 2000 they just don't play together. I'm also having issues getting the AP's to grab DHCP addresses wirelessly. Example.... If I take the riocar and set it's IP address, and set the IP address of the AP all works great wirelessly but trying to get wireless DHCP has not worked yet for me. I'm hoping I'll have better luck when my D-link PCI card arrives.

Also watch your prices, I walked into my local neighborhood PC store the other day and all the prices seemed OK til I saw what they had for the D-link all in one kit 584.00!!! thats ridiculous.... www.tigerdirect.com has the DWL-1000 for 79.00 and the PCI card for 79.00.... IBM high rate PCMCIA cards for 50 bucks.... so shop around

An idea for DHCP via wireless ..

What I do is reserve an ip for the specific MAC address of the wireless NIC. That way you can set it to dhcp, but you'll always the same ip. Seems to work for me.

Using D-Link, Orinoco, Addtron, and US Robotics nics DHCP works for me. I have an SMC access point/gateway. The only way my network is protected is 64-bit WEP. MAC addresses are not specified in the access point.

Well I actually tried that.... see I have an XP machine I use for a internet connection sharing. So thats when I figured out my cards didn't work with my AP through 2k... after I set up a DHCP server specifically for this purpose and after I went throught the Jreceiver install... it's odd the cards detect the AP in 2000 but can't connect, I've tried everything, reserving the MAC through DHCP adding the MAC for the card in the AP.

I should also add.... my wireless card is a pcmcia ibm high rate wireless card... I'm using an internal pcmcia reader to use it. I think the IBM card is the problem, simply because theres little documentation and the drivers and client software provided by IBM kind of sucks. XP auto detects them using XP they work OK... but still have dhcp issues... ... I'm hoping that after I get the D-link card it'll work better with 2k and resolve my DHCP issues