Re: Non-Apple airport hub?
Christian Pernegger wrote:
> I'd really like to have wireless networking on my iBook and I'm
> prepared to buy the add-on card for it is said to work well.
It's so affordable now days, it really makes sense. Apple laptops are great,
as they get a tremendous battery life compared to their Intel counterparts....
> However, I don't like Apple's hub at all. It is quite expensive, I
> don't need the built-in modem and AFAIK it can only be configured via
> MacOS, which I don't have running anywhere.
I'm not sure why you are so negative on the Apple "UFO", I was going to buy
one myself, but stalled for my company to get me one.
> Has anyone tried the airport card with another wireless hub, and
> succeeded? Is it possible in theory? It's supposed to be compatible
> with some standards, after all.
I use mine with 3Com hubs all the time, and just got a 3Com Home Wireless
Gateway. As long as you have an 802.11 compliant access point, the airport
card should work. The Apple Base Station, at US $299 forced most of the
competitors to bring the price down, the Apple was about 1/3rd the cost of the
competition. The 3Com Home Wireless Gateway lists for $399, but it also has 3
jacks for wire clients as well as the wireless, and will support up to 256
DHCP clients (so you can run hubs into it if you like, as you can the Apple).
I am not pushing their product in any way, although it's worked fine so far
and I used my PowerBook running Debian to configure it. I was looking closely
at the LinkSys model that was about $259, I like LinkSys products as they have
pretty good support for Linux and use Linux in many of their products. Since
my work got this for me, I couldn't argue with that...but anyone interested
should consider LinkSys products as well as 3Com or other competitively priced
ones (Apple included;-).
The 3Com will allow configuration with any web browser, as most all of their
products, and I think LinkSys products work the same. 3Com's previous product
listed for ~$1100 and had pretty much the same features as the Apple "UFO" had
for 1/3rd the price. Cisco also had a similar product price competitive with
the 3Com, and there are a couple other off brand devices for about US
$250-$275. I used an off brand one with my airport card (but running MacOS9)
at a friend's. If I need to attend a meeting at work I've been using MacOS9
running an ssh terminal to a linux box and can get most all of my work done
that way during a meeting, hoping to get the airport going on ppc linux soon
though...gonna go look at that now...;-)
--
Alan DuBoff
Software Orchestration, Inc.
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