wireless is cool

[Paul_Melson@keykertusa.com]

>It was not exactly an instant success.  I fought with the driver
>for a while.  But after a bit I figured out how to do it.  And
>now I have 11 Mbps connectivity, unplugged, anywhere in the
>building, and everything happens correctly, including routes and
>ifconfigs and all, just by plugging in the card.  It's like
>magic, except that I know how it works because I wrote (or
>modified and fixed, more like) a bit of the tool that does it.
>
>Wireless is cool.

In my opinion, it's a give and take.  You're not switched, so more users
== less bandwidth for you.  It also suffers from latency problems under
high load, and can be slow to recover from signal degradation (though
rather than drop your carrier, it will decrease speed from 11Mbps down to
4, then 2, then 1 before dropping the link, which makes it cooler than
Ethernet).  Beyond that, improper (aka default) installs are security
nightmares.  Any fool with a wireless card can walk in your building and
sniff traffic on the segment.  In some instances, they could even sit in
the parking lot and still see packets.  Older implementations which used
static-key DES and the current WEP standard both suffer from their own
security shortcomings, as well, so .  And of course, there are issues with
the 2.4GHz range not being broad enough to accommodate a large number of
devices, so it doesn't scale well.

I don't know if you've seen the research or not, but anyone who's
interested in the shortcomings of WEP should read Bill Arbaugh's web page
on 802.11 security.  http://www.cs.umd.edu/~waa/wireless.html

PaulM