Wireless Anyone??

Lexxdymondz · February 2004

A friend of mine asked me to connect his network at work. I agreed to help but have a couple questions for the gurus here.

Situation: He has a wired workstation connected to a DSL modem and a notebook with a wireless connection for his home wireless network. He wants to share the workstations DSL connection with the wireless laptop and have a peer-to-peer network between his workstation and laptop.

1. Does he need another wireless PCMCIA card for the new wireless network at his office? Or can he use the one for his home network?

2. He wants to be able to access his work computer from the road with his laptop. Is this possible without having to get a server? If this can be done does he have to use a "hot spot" like starbucks or something like that??

This is the wireless router I suggested for him, can anyone think of anything better?

Sorry for all the questions, but I have no real experience with wireless what so ever.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

viper75 · February 2004

Ok,

1)He can use the same NIC he has now. No worries there.

2)If he wants to access his home PC from the road he has to be at a"Hot Spot". The best program that I would recommend for remote accessability is pcAnyWhere. He has to have the software installed on both PC's and have it running on his home PC as the host with username and password for security. All he has to know would be his external IP address and that's it!!!

I strongly recommend that you setup the security on his Access Point with encryption keys. I have personally never worked with a Linksys Wireless AP, but I'm pretty sure that you should have the option to setup security. I have however worked with the Linksys wired cable\dsl routers and Cisco 1200 Aironet Antennas. Security is a big issue that many homes and companies do not enforce when it comes to wireless devices. Can't understand why.

Here at my job we do a lot of wireless with our clients and I'm incharge of setting up the laptops and AP with 128-bit encryption. No laptops and AP's leave my office without the security being applied.

You do not want your wireless network to be exposed without security.

RussS · February 2004

Viper covered it all in my opinion

Of course I personally hate PC Anywhere and use Remote Administrator as I consider it less resource intensive, but thats just me.

Webmaster · February 2004

1. Does he need another wireless PCMCIA card for the new wireless network at his office? Or can he use the one for his home network?

Yes, he can probably use the same NIC (unless his home network is built with 802.11a products). 802.11g, hence the router you suggested, is backward-compatible with 802.11b. So if the home network is 802.11b and hence also his NIC, he will be able to connect to the 802.11g router but only at 11 Mbps (802.11b coding scheme) and not at the 54 Mbps the 802.11g router can handle. This will actually slow down the entire mixed 802.11b/802.11g network, because the 802.11g devices all have to adept to CSMA/CA rules dicated by 802.11b devices.
So, if this is the case, I would suggest a 802.11g nic for the laptop.

If both home and office network are 802.11g, ignore the above

Lexxdymondz · March 2004

Thanks for all the help. I really appreciate it. I'll give ya and update once we get it done.

Thanks again.

Lexxdymondz · March 2004

Forgive me if this sounds a little stupid but im not really familiar with pcanywhere.

Could someone run through the steps to connect to a computer through a router using dhcp and nat? Would he need to know the external router address?

2lazybutsmart · March 2004

are you using version 10?

Well I use version 10 for some simple remote connectivites. When I connect my computer to another one through a router, I usually specify the target computer's publicIP address -that's all. Of course the host computer will have to be waiting. Then of course, you'll get through if the router is configured properly. I don't recall entering the external IP address of the router in the connections dialog.

The NAT stuff and tunelling part of the story----well, I think someone else will explain that, but what I mentioned above works for me always.

Wireless Anyone??

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