Multihomed WLANs from Intel 128
accessdeniednsp writes: "El Reg gives us some insight on Intel Labs' new software to let your wireless LAN card hop between various networks (802.3, 802.11, and 'fixed Ethernet' they call it). Perfect for us snoopers to walk by college frat houses and hopping on the 'net with our linux ipaq's :)" First company to come out with a "universal connectivity" PCMCIA card wins all the marbles.
Multi homed? (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Who does the hardware? (Score:2, Interesting)
Not only this, but will the hardware be reliable? I recently set up a LinkSys Wireless router for a friend and anytime more than one PC generates traffic, the router simply locks up - it must be reset. If this is how the hardware is going to be than no thanks.
I hope someone is using their head and actually tests this equipment before putting it out on the marketplace.
Re:Who does the hardware? (Score:1)
Re:Who does the hardware? (Score:2)
So I bought the SMC router/wap, and guess what - it's just as buggy. It locks up every 2 or 3 days.
-tim
Re:Who does the hardware? (Score:2)
Re:Who does the hardware? (Score:2)
Mine never locked up either, not even after it broke. It just started dropping about 30% of the traffic. Cisco wanted $750 to fix it (which is more then I payed for it). Apparently that's more then they sell for right no too.
I bought a new Apple base station, which seems to have less range then the Cisco, but it is prettier.
Just means people who are serious about... (Score:3)
I certainly think it's a good idea, though. I can imagine this kind of universal wireless compatibility preventing a lot of headaches for busy travelers when airports and mass transit terminals start implementing WLANs.
Now if I could only get my boss to let us put up an 802.11 network so I can code from Barnes & Noble down the street...
Frats with LANs? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Frats with LANs? (Score:1)
Re:Frats with LANs? (Score:5, Informative)
I do phone support and I hear a lot of people getting into wireless routers b/c of the ease of having it run to all the computers in the house. Why not do it for frats?
And unfortunatly I do have a WLAN but no kegerator
Re:Frats with LANs? (Score:1)
Re:Frats with LANs? (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure they really wanted you to buy the T1 for $4500/month. Even these days with DSL and Cablemodem everywhere they still want $1500/month for a T1 and have completly forgotten about ISDN again.
Re:Frats with LANs? (Score:1)
Presto. 112K full-time connectivity for $35 a month. Plus twenty cents, of course.
Re:Frats with LANs? (Score:1)
Re:Frats with LANs? (Score:1)
Re:You are so funny (Score:2)
that's my opinion though.
as far as the "white smoke running through air tubes..." I KNOW WHAT IT IS
Re:wireless handheld: theory and practice (Score:1)
New Software (Score:1, Offtopic)
Maybe a MS Office Lane, or Metallica Street?
Re:catching up with the mac (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:catching up with the mac (Score:4, Informative)
You need to get your information straight. This article is talking about completely different architectures being supported with no additional hardware.
Besides, any NT based (at least from 4.0 up to 2000 and XP) can change settings on the fly. As a matter of fact, XP can even retain settings for more than one network and automatically switch between the two, one w/ DHCP and another with static settings. Or you could use NetSwitcher [netswitcher.com] to do it...
Re:catching up with the mac (Score:2)
Re:catching up with the mac (Score:1)
Re:catching up with the mac (Score:1)
What we really need (Score:5, Interesting)
who pays for firmware upgrade? (Score:3, Insightful)
Changing that model to new features = software download is substantially different, and a little scary for business.
If they offer a download, they would need to charge for it: software doesnt write itself.
With all the headaches associated with verifying
software releases across multiple hardware versions, I think it's cheaper and easier for everyone involved to just buy a new $100 hardware
when it comes out, rather than deal with the buggy firmware upgrades.
Re:who pays for firmware upgrade? (Score:1)
I believe the enabling technology is that sonicwall chose to build on a extendible, scalable platform themselves. A big benefits is that their systems do get better over time, unlike most pieces of hardware or software in which each new device/version often moves the users back down the reliability curve until the bugs get worked out.
Re:earth to jerryasher: apples and oranges (Score:1)
You say you wouldn't want to download updates for your two year old nic? Why not? Most of the rest of us relatively faithfully look forward to new and updated drivers. What do you think those drivers are?
I download/upload new firmware to my motherboard (that has given me support for SMP and faster processors). I download/upload new firmware and drivers for my various video cards (Matrox esp.). I bet those with winmodem download/upload new firmware and drivers for their winmodems. I know many of us downloaded/uploaded new firmware when our modems went through that 33Kbaud -> KFlex/Foo/56Kbaud nonsense years back.
If you have a high performance SCSI board there's a very good chance you're on the download/upload track for that board.
Gosh there really is little difference between a card for a PC and any other piece of equipment.
Re:who pays for firmware upgrade? (Score:2)
Re:What we really need (Score:2, Informative)
To get specific, 802.11a uses a different spectrum (5.5GHz) and 802.11g uses OFDM for modulation at 2.4GHz, and both of these are vastly different (hardware level) from 802.11b. Secondarily, the other 802.11x standards mostly effect the MAC layer (QoS et al) and this is typically not handled by a general purpose processor, so just upgrading the firmware won't necessarily help here either.
Just my 2 cents
Re:What we really need (Score:1)
Re:What we really need (Score:2)
If you think you can offload OFDM encoding and decoding to the CPU, think about the kind of bus bandwidth you'd need to do it. PCI runs 64 bits at 66 MHz, best case. That's a bandwidth of 512MBps. Suppose you could specify a single chip with one bit on the bus; then you could live with a chipping rate of 4Gcps. Given the 10.4dB processing gain, you're _bus_ bandwidth capped at 372Mbps, and that's with nothing else running.
Let's get a little more realistic: currently PCI runs at 32 bits 33MHz in your desktop machine. That means that if your computer is ONLY sending chips over the bus, you can't even do turbo mode (dual channel) 802.11a. (93Mbps 108Mbps).
Now let's make things worse. To make it completely frequency independant, we assume you only need to code the ISM bands: 26MHz wide at 915MHz, 83.5MHz wide at 2.4GHz, and 125MHz wide at 5.8GHz. That's a total of 234.5 MHz of bandwidth. Now you've got to cover about 4-8 times as much ground as the simple 802.11a situation, and you're still dependant on the ASIC translating your chips into OFDM modulated stuff.
I'm not enough the physical layer guy to tell you how much data you need to pass across the bus to get OFDM to work without the hardware knowing anything about it...
Lots of the 802.11i stuff is aimed at being back-compatible to existing WEP hardware. It's hard to make things like QoS do that though.
Winmodems can work because the bandwidth of a phone line is so small. With the size of frequency bands in the ISM band, you can't do that anymore.
Walking around campus (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Walking around campus (Score:1)
Or, how about moving from one building on campus to another with your laptop packed up in sleep-mode, breaking it out in your next class ready to go with no hassle?
It's not necessarily for your literal WWW-on-the-go, but for the hassle of getting there and moving from net to net. Those of us who do have it (I've got my wireless NIC at work) would *love* to see that.
all the marbles (Score:1, Offtopic)
Is this a good thing? (Score:1)
Or maybe a better example would be your intranet mail server disapears because now you're hooked into the Starbucks network?
Is thought being dedicated to when the user wants to switch providers?
_Am
Re:Is this a good thing? (Score:1)
Frats (Score:3, Funny)
Call me crazy, but I don't remember most of the frats in my college being crazy about wireless ethernet. They were too busy drinking/partying/etc. I guess maybe if you're at MIT...
Re:Frats (Score:1)
for the numbers, im in a fraternity and every room is fully hardwired. Plus we have a 802.11 hub running for public access. Works great for sharin MP3 libraries during parties! And the 802.11 draws in TONS of geeks with ipaqs for us to throw water balloons at!! woohoo!
Roland
;)
Wrong!!!! (Score:1)
Frats have WLANs it seems (Score:1)
Re:Power Consumption (Score:1)
"Sehert said the CPU only accounted for seven per cent of the typical power consumption of a mobile device (although the chipset accounted for another 13 per cent). With the LCD sucking up a third of the power consumed, that's where the problem lies."
in other words - why is Intel focusing so much on "Device Performance States" and s/w embedding when much of the problem they're trying to solve is external
All your marble are belong to Nokia (Score:2)
Re:All your marble are belong to Nokia (Score:1)
Re:All your marble are belong to Nokia (Score:2)
you can do much of this now (Score:5, Informative)
The basic idea is to set up a gateway on both the wired and wireless networks, and proxies ARPs on both networks, so that hosts on the different network see each other as if they were on the same LAN. This is a little like bridging--except that only a tiny bit of traffic (the ARP's) needs to "bridge" the two networks. The rest is taken care of by normal routing.
The trick is switching a host from wired to wireless without changing its IP addresses (so it doesn't drop any connections). Note this implies that the gateway's routing table has a host route (specifying the interface) to every address that is allowed to switch networks: you can't tell from the address which side its on, so the usual subnet mask routing won't work.
Pulling off the switch requires that the gateway be able to detect the switch, and then do two things: One, change its routing table, so that traffic for the address goes out on the right interface. Two, send "gratuitous ARPs" to other hosts, forcing them to update their ARP tables (since, if the host moved to the other network, traffic to it now needs to be routed through the gateway).
I think the most straightforward way to detect the switch is to have the gateway run a DHCP server, and have the mobile hosts renegotiate a lease when they switch networks. Then, add a hook to the DHCP server to do the magic whenever it notices a host renegotiate on a different network. For the mobile hosts to be identifyable across networks, they need to send the same client-identifier on both networks. Since the default client-identifier is usually the MAC address, this requires configuration on the clients (I edit /etc/dhclient.conf and pick one MAC address to use as
the client-identifier). Of course, the DHCP server needs to be configured
to give out the same address range on both interfaces.
Unfortunately, on the network I care about, my gateway is not the DHCP server. Instead, I run a DHCP relay. This mostly works--except the ISC DHCP relay doesn't have any hooks, and I haven't hacked it to add them. But it should be easy.
Another way to solve this might be for the gateway simply to monitor ARPs and do something when it notices a host switch networks. I haven't found a clean way to do this, and I think it might be less than perfect, because the host wouldn't get switched until it initiated an ARP transaction.
The last problem is that different systems seem to respond differently to gratuitous ARPs. For example, Linux systems don't seem to require them at all, because they (apparently) issue a new ARP pretty quickly after the old MAC address stops answering. But I can't get Solaris systems to listen to gratuitious ARPs at all, and they don't time out for minutes.
Also, gratuitiously ARPing the whole network is ugly. Ideally, we would would only send an ARP when we notice another host using a MAC that we know has moved to the other network. I have no idea how to do this.
Despite all the glitches, it's quite fun to switch to the wireless for mobility and back to the ethernet for speed, without losing my ssh connections. Improvements on this setup would be welcome!
Re:you can do much of this now (Score:2)
Re:you can do much of this now (Score:2)
It doesn't. Read again. But, yeah, you could trigger this off of whatever you use to switch interfaces (ie, PCMCIA scripts).
broadcast ping the subnet you're on now, and the one you just left. That's enough for more hardware out there to get it's head out of its ass and recognize your host
My experience is that hardware can be pretty stubborn, but I'll try it. Thanks for the idea.
Cool... (Score:1)
what do they mean with 802.3 *and* fixed ethernet? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:what do they mean with 802.3 *and* fixed ethern (Score:2)
Try this link [ieee.org] instead, as it actually works. (The "Preview" button, and the left mouse button, are your friends.)
(BTW, the top-level 802.x page [ieee.org] has links to a lot of information about 802.x standards, including a page of links to pages for the working groups for each 802.x standard [ieee.org] (I'm amused to find that the 802 standards committee appears to be supersititious - they say 802.13 wasn't used), as well as a link to the Get IEEE 802(TM) page [ieee.org] from which you can download, for free, PDFs for 802.x standards that were published 6 or more months ago.
Skamana (Score:1)
Intel's demo showed Skamania (cute name) hopping between 802.11, 802.3 and fixed Ethernet, ....
Skamania is the name of a county along Washington State's southern border with Oregon, by the Columbia River.
Intel has a facility nearby.
I figured they were just Skam Records fans. (Score:2)
Too little too late? (Score:2)
--Blair
OSX? (Score:3, Informative)
Power Consumption Reference Also Interesting (Score:2, Insightful)
It seems to me that controlling power consumption requires a user eye-tracking mode. As I look at my dual screen setup, at every moment my focus rests only on a small couple of square cm of the screen. Surely with eye tracking it should be possible to dim/fade the rest of the screen, cutting down power consumption.
This might also have advantages for graphics cards/CPU, because you could concentrate on doing most your rendering and aliasing in only the portion of the screen within eye focus. For that to work you'd need some sort of tile-based rendering system though.
Wireless Frat Houses? (Score:2)
I can only imagine what would happen for people using netstumbler:
"The airwaves! They're saturated! I've never seen so much pr0n!"
In all honesty, I've mentioned a number of times the advantage of wiring up the ol' fraternity house.
Since most of them are not geeks, their eyes get more glazed over than after a 6 kegger party. Simply stated, most fraternity members are not interested in being able to run SSH over an 802.11b WLAN.
Being able to score with the hotties in the sorrority next door, that's another thing entirely.
Go Deke!
Nokia Wins (Score:3, Informative)
Here's a news item at InfoSync [infosync.no] about the new Nokia GSM, GPRS, HSCSD, and WiFi PCMCIA card.
Pretty freakin' cool. I want one.
-Russ
funny (Score:1, Funny)
it's not really a cute name...Skamania is the name of a county near Portland (Intel HQ)
They get all their names from locations here...Wilamette, Tualitin, etc...
BUT IT'S NOT CUTE!
Re:sorry , offtopic but this is important (Score:1)