Re: Wireless networking question

[Balazs Javor <jb4@freemail.hu>]

Hi,

Thank you all for your suggestions.
They basically confirm my fears that it isn't going to be
very simple.
I must admit I'm not a networking expert, allthough I thought,
that I have a good understanding of the basics.
Please let me give you some more details on my (probably typical)
setup and some of my goals/assumptions. Maybe you could then
suggest me the best way to proceed:

I have an ADSL router connected to a network switch along with
3 PCs connected to the same switch. They all are on the same subnet
and all have the router as the default gateway. So long so fine.
They can all talk to each other, share files and access the Internet.

Now comes the notebook. I have configured (for now) the built-in NIC
the same way as with the other machines, so it works as well.
Now, I've ordered the Orinoco Gold PCMCIA card along with the RG-1100
wireless access point. It is my understanding that you can set up the
access point to act purely as a bridge. Where my assumption was that
it will basically act as a "wire to radio signal converter" and if it
were not for the built-in NIC, I could just plug the access point into
the switch, the PCMCIA card into the notebook and configure the card to
be on the same subnet as the other machines, and everything would
work as before.

And if this is the only easy way, then I would simply not use the
built-in NIC. However, since the built-in NIC is about 10 times
faster, I was kinda hoping that I could somehow make it possible,
that whenever I am at my desk or whenever I need to transfer large
amount of data to the notebook I could just simply "switch" to the
built-in NIC.
Now if I need to configure either of the cards to be on a separate
subnet I would need to route that subnet to the original network
somehow as both the fileserver and the Internet gateway are on that one.
So I would need to set up one of the other machines with another NIC
and set it up to be the router between the two networks. And this I
think is a bit too complicated for what I wanted to use it for...

However maybe it is possible to have both NICs be configured for the
same IP address and manually switch between them, so that only
one of them is up at a given moment?

So what do you think is the best approach?
Many thanks again for your help!
regards,
Balazs