Kevin McGregor wrote:
Does anyone have some pointers (personal experiences, URLs, etc) on how to set up a point to point (house to house) wireless network? I and two geeky neighbours are thinking about setting up a private internal network to connect our houses, and we're not sure where to start.
The standard Linksys router (WRT54G-style) won't be a great choice, for the main reason that someone else here has mentioned: crappy radios. However, Buffalo seems to have mitigated most of the problems with the broadcom radio - we replaced all the WRT54Gs at work with Buffalo WHR-54s (or something like that - check out the chart at http://www.dd-wrt.com/) and instantly got easily double to triple the range of the Linksys units, despite being based on the same reference design.
I would suggest buying three Buffalos (cheaper than the Linksys, by mail-order only - no-one in the city seems to carry them), loading either OpenWRT or DD-WRT on them [I prefer DD-WRT, it seems more integrated], using the factory-default antennas, and EITHER putting them all in ad-hoc mode, or putting one of them (the geographically central one) in AP mode and the other two in client mode.
I would also strongly recommend you NOT put them in bridge mode, rather use them as proper routers - no need for NAT, specifically, but you really really really don't want all your broadcast and/or multicast traffic flooding the wireless side of things.
-Adam