Gently nudged into wireless with a sledgehammer.

Traditionally. I have avoided wireless like a ton of falling bricks.  Security requirements for wireless changes so fast that it is almost cost prohibitive to use. But so it goes. You say you will never use wireless, but you gently get attracted to using it like a drug. My first experience at using wireless was going to a retail establishment and taking advantage of their network. Then came the time I was staying at my brother's home while the AC was out, so to get internet I had to use wireless. Now with the Nexus 7 wireless has to be part of the home network.

Let me digress here for a minute. How have we connected computers together in the past.  Originally people  used what is know as serial via modems (the old fashiion kind that hooked to the telephone line) or directly between two systems via serial ports. For more details see: http://www.instructables.com/id/Legacy-networking-with-linux/. Then there was good old Laplink to transfer data between computers. Then we finally had real computer networking in such ways as token ring, arcnet, a host of others and now ethernet.

As I said in the last article, you can hook together two computes with just a crossover cable.  if you want to connect several computers together you would need a network switch. It plays traffic cop to manage the communication between several systems. Home networks are sort of the new model railroad. Instead of watching little cars go around on a track, we are watching movies from a network and the like. Some of the computer nerds might have more than one network.

In some cases we might want to have more that one network for various reasons. One for the media room and one for the computer room as an example. Of course at some time you will want to connect them together. The easy way would be to run some cable between two points. We have a training room that hosts a thin client network. Except for internet access, it is pretty much standalone. But to connect it to the main network requires cabling.



Did not want to run cabling between the two rooms. Had to have a better plan. There was alreading electrical wiring between the two rooms, Could I use that?  Actually, yes you can. There are adapters available known as EOP (Ethernet over power) that will let you do just that. When I need to update the server, that is what I use to connect the main network which has access to the internet.  So far so good.



Now comes the fun part. What if I wanted to use the network where neither cabling or the EOP would work such as a home down the street. Utoh, there comes that nudging... Yep, it is time to use wireless. You could have a whole bunch of wireless devices just all connect back to what is known as a wap (wireless access point). Most modern routers with wifi can do that. But what if you have computing devices that either do not have up to date wifi security or just do not have wifi?


You could use two wifi routers by bridging them, but then that leads to extra management of the wifi. I really wanted something simpler. You can use what is known as a wireless access client that can connect to the first wireless access point. Virtually no extra maintence once you set it up. You will need the mac access address and the ssid of the network access point you want to connect to. Good, no need to connect to anyone elses network. You have to be careful though some wireless access points claim also they can be clients, but that is not always true. Then you can attach a switch to the access point client to use more than one computing device. Of course the speed of that connection will vary with added devices.

That is my small trip into starting using wifi devices.

Note. You do need to use wfi security in setting up all the devices. Do not just connect them together and expect them to be secure. That is another article to get into the details of wifi security.

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