Ok, for some time now, I’ve been using my old Samsung Vm8100KXDT Laptop to connect my wired network to my Linksys WRT54GS router, which resides on another floor.
Well, if you read my old Drupal blog, you may have noticed, that I complained several times about my Netgear WG311T PCI card, being not able to be run in my PowerPCs. That’s the reason why my Laptop was acting as a wired/wireless bridge (or more exactly a router between both worlds).
Today I bought a Linksys WET54G wireless bridge to replace my Laptop for that purpose. My Laptop was just too noisy and too power consuming and – even worse – the harddisk began to die. It was giving loud *klackklack* noises from time to time, resulting in a loss of DMA and therefore needed a power cycle afterwards.
Anyway, the WET54G is a nice small box with one antenna and one ethernet port. It is advertised as being a operating system independent device – which is clearly not true. You’ll need a Windows PC to configure the device and it’s quite awful to configure.
Instead of accessing the WET54G bei http, the CD-Rom contains a small program that scans the ethernet for that device. Next problem will arise when you want to configure your WLAN/WiFi settings. It is pre-configured to use channel 6 and infrastructure mode. Unfortunately, you’ll need to first configure infrastructure or ad-hoc mode before you proceed to configure your ESSID, channel and b/g/mixed mode settings. Even worse because you can’t change the channel or the mode when you have chosen infrastructure mode.
So in order to change your channel, you’ll need to configure it in ad-hoc mode first, then change your channel and mode first, safe your settings, let the device reboot and continue with configuring infrastructure mode again.
Really badly tested piece of software, Linksys!
But beside of this huge annoyance the WET54G works quite nice once setup properly. Alas, I can’t recommend it to buy for the above reasons.
Update:
After configuring it the first time, there actually is a webinterface, where you can configure the device with your favorite free OS. However, it was not accessible the first time to me, although I configured a Laptop to use the described default network in the manual. The above mentioned problems of not being able to configure the channel in infrastructure mode still exists in the webinterface.