wifi and PLN

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

Well I finally received the DSL modem 8D I plugged it to the ass of my OpenBSD server and had to put all the 4 computers of the house on the same network. Since my room is downstairs near the garage and all the rest of the house is upstairs the problem was how to wire all this altogether. I tried 56kbps wifi in ad-hoc mode (no concentrator), but heck, even though the 2 ends of the link are almost at the vertical of each other, it doesn't work well at all, sometimes the link can't even be established, sometimes the pings time out, that much that it's almost unusable. I tried this for 2-3 days and I had to give up with this method. For me wifi = crap. I wonder how commercials manage to hype and sell stuff that does not work.

Now the good thing is that I discovered Power Line Networking adapters It's sort of little boxes you plug on the power line with a RJ45 adapter from your existing network at the end, and it's the power lines circuit of your house that do the networking. And boy, that rocks It can go up to 20Mb or so, no more wires, no more hub/switch, and TOTAL TRANSPARENCY. You plug your RJ45 into the power socket and you have the home network everywhere where there's a power plug. €99 for 2 adapters. And that technology is expected to evolve a lot in a near future.

Just wanted to share my experience. Forget about wifi, bluetooth and all that wireless crap. PLN simply rocks

[Leagle]

grr arg

[>BKA< T Wrecks]

A large German company wanted to introduce PLN hardware on a big scale here in Germany some 2 or 3 years ago, but they kept having problems and finally dropped it. I think they wanted to use it to offer an alternative to DSL internet connection, but it didn't quite work out. Too expensive, too unreliable devices - so they said

Now, with all the hype about BlueTooth and WLAN, it seems to be almost forgotten, although those adapters for home networking now exist, which is a good thing.

One aspect you forgot to mention is the additional security. No more Mr. Parasite parked in your front yard with a laptop and WLAN card, no more interesting chalk signs near your house ("those kids sure scribble odd symbols on the walls nowadays...") - perfect. Congrats!

[@$3.1415rin]

hm, I have a WLan DSL modem here too, and well, it works, but only unencrypted, we havn't managed yet to get all receivers receive encrypted data, one always fails - and the strange thing is that it's not only a special one :/

well, now I have holidays, most ppl are at home, so I switched it off ... but when the semester restarts, the configsessions will restart, I fear

[von Ryan]

Well, here @ my place, we have a DSL modem (working as a 1-port router) connected to a 4-port ethernet switch that distributes the internet between the 2 computers. We can do that because the computers are side by side

Maybe, in a far future, I'll put my computer in my bedroom and make a Wi-Fi 802.11b (or g). But that's a HUGE maybe...

[HangFire]

Thats pretty much the same setup that I have here. I considered making it wireless, but I already had a ethernet switch.

[Cpl. Shrike]

No thanks about PLN.
1G lan rocks. NFS mounts act almost as fast local disks

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

1Gb lan, nice... if you have the lan in the walls

meh, I have my little network everywhere there's a power socket nagnagnag

[Rick]

wohoo my pc now works as a wlan access point
Now I've got both LAN and WLAN

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

beware, someday I'll park my car near your house and then... PWNED