Breaking weeks of blog-o-silence for this update…
I recently moved from RIT’s dorms to an apartment I share with some CSHers. Unfortunately, among the wide variety of amenities offered, wireless Internet is not one of them.
Unfortunately, I’ve been very spoiled in terms of networking hardware, having worked with Cisco’s product line, and I find it painful and miss the features when I’m using consumer-grade electronics. Unfortunately, Cisco wireless technology costs an arm and a leg.
The solution? I purchased a Linksys WRT54GL, a device specifically designed for people to use their own linux distros on. I put on OpenWRT, which gave me a variety of commercial-grade options for a pittance of the price.
I’m broadcasting a few SSIDs – a WPA2-Personal network for apartment mates to have their own little network (Opcom-Net-Internal), a WPA2-Personal network that ust acts as as WAP for my apartment’s wired network (Opcom-Net-External), and a WPA2-Enterprise network that uses OpenVPN and some kludging together in order to provide a seamless connection to CSH’s network (cshnowires-eap). (That last one isn’t quite working yet, but I’ll work on it more after I change some things that need changing on CSH’s own wireless; no use configuring things twice for a new setup) This could simply not be done without multiple SSID broadcasts, VPN, RADIUS, VLANs, and a variety of other enterprise-only features that one could simply not get for the $50 I paid for this network device. Amazing. Highly recommend this device; the only downside is that it’s wireless-G, and not N, and that there is not a whole lot of flash/RAM for programs, but this comes with the embedded territory.
Following my usual naming scheme, the hostname for this device is “Dr. Bob”, which fits especially well considering it’s plugged into my Cisco network switch “Dr. Pepper”. The good doctors are quite kind on my network :-)
