Wireles Network cards - advice needed

I have a Linksys Access point with extenal antenna to get a signal to a portacabin/classroom.

The classroom has a Linksys Range expander so signal in the portacabin is pretty good.

Now my problem is that the pc's in the portacabin are not defaulting to the strongest signal - there is a very very weak signal from another access point in the area and they try that 1st (and fail)

Now these pc's have a mix of netgear usb cards and some cheap asus pci cards - all doing a similar thing.

I have permission to replace the cards with some Better ones - i need your advice / xperiences before i go ahead and buy some.

Cheers

Si

personally.....

get another Access point & bridge them, then your PCs can just plug into a switch.

I'm reasonably sure the Linksys models do this.

Have you tried setting a preferred network? As long as the network you want the machine to connect to is at the top of the list it should connect to that one first.

That should work, if it doesn't Alex's idea would be a good one to try, i'd say it would be more reliable too.

Even think about replacing the AP's with the Linksys models with speedbooster for better throughput.

Does the access point providing the weak signal allow you to disallow clients based on their connection speed, i used to control a bunch of Cisco AP1200s that let you select which minimum speeds it would hold clients at, if they could not stay at that speed it would kick them off and refuse to auth them, meaning they would seach for another AP and jump on that one

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Originally Posted by Alex

personally.....

get another Access point & bridge them, then your PCs can just plug into a switch.

I'm sure the Linksys models do this.

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We did this with a couple of buffalo units and it has been very successful

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Originally Posted by Alex

personally.....

get another Access point & bridge them, then your PCs can just plug into a switch.

I'm reasonably sure the Linksys models do this.

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Would mean cabling between 2 rooms then - for the sake of 5 pc's i'd rather buy the cards.

Tried the prefered networks thing - but they still not great.

Cisco look nice but at £100+ a card 8O

So may just go with some Linksys cards and see how they get on.

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Originally Posted by pooley

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Alex

personally.....

get another Access point & bridge them, then your PCs can just plug into a switch.

I'm reasonably sure the Linksys models do this.

---

Would mean cabling between 2 rooms then - for the sake of 5 pc's i'd rather buy the cards.

Tried the prefered networks thing - but they still not great.

Cisco look nice but at £100+ a card 8O

So may just go with some Linksys cards and see how they get on.

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You'de only 1 short cable for each PC to the switch? Or are some of the PCs in a different room?

I've not been too impressed with any of the Linksys kit. Saying that I don't know what to recommend really.

I would say that it isn't a problem with the NICs as such, rather a problem with how they connect to the APs. Have you tried giving the APs completely different settings? (different SSID, different WEP keys, etc.)

If you only store the settings for your preferred AP, you will only connect to that one.

You could also try using the MAC filter on the AP you don't want to connect to. Tell it to disallow the MACs of the PCs.

Linksys is now owned by Cisco so expect decent kit and performance. I think Cisco wanted to get into the home/SOHO wireless network market and that's why they bought linksys.

From what i heard of them Linksys stuff is pretty good.

Ashok.

Netgear stuff is good in my usage, as is Buffalo and the 3com seems ok, but I have had some Asus cards and the big issue with them and I think all wifi cards is dont put on there stupid management stuff they mess it all up, just get the latest driver off the makers site and thats it, no fancy configuration stuff as that is really where most issues seem to come in.

The majority of our WAPs at work are Linksys. The model we have is the WAP54G. They're cheap and they support WPA-RADIUS and AES encryption. However they do have an extremely annoying habit of crashing and require resetting periodically. They also crap out if you have more than three or four clients connecting to them.

I'm looking at replacing them with 3Com Officeconnect 8250s once April arrives. Whether it happens or not is another thing though....

@ashok: Indeed Cisco do own Linksys but the Linksys branded stuff seems to be built as cheaply as they can get away with.

I have a Linksys ADSL modem/wifi AP jobbie and it will drop its net connection for fun (requiring weekly hard resets as a minimum). Because of the cheapness of this 'consumer' kit and the problems I've also had with D-Link wireless gubbins, I've pledged to buy decent wifi kit (I now have a 3COM 8150 AP - awesome and bought for £70 off ebay!) and I intend to use something like Bluesocket gear at work.

DLINk. Oh boy. Set up a wireless DLINK AP for one admin machine..seemed to work OK. Won't connect to network until *after* login. Too late the hero. Tried everything with this little gizmo (and I didn't choose it) so would love to buy something a lot more robust and powerful..

*sigh*

Who cares. It's the weekend.

Me. EndRant

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personally.....

get another Access point & bridge them, then your PCs can just plug into a switch.

I'm sure the Linksys models do this.

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We also did this in sevral areas of our large site. We have this in four differnet areas which connects over 18 mobile classrooms and it all works very well.

Slighly going off main topic, but we have put back the wireless project and it was a marthon persuading th manegement that wireless is not a good idea at present. We have a good wired infrastructure in place and almost a dual data socket and every teaching rooms.

Of course every school's requirement is different but i personally think schools should wait for 802.11n standard which is expected to provide better speed and range and security. I'm not so hot on the WiMax and if it will be successfully but since 11n is from IEEE it got a more chance of being in the mainstream.

I think the Laptops will be capable of connecting to 11n networks providing the wireless mini PCI cards are replaced. So the investment in laptops is protected for the time being.

The main thing is when will the 11n kit be out and what will be the prices?

Right back to the main topic. I think if you are going to deploy wireless then there should be some research done on the range requirements, client requirements, applications, bandwidth etc. I do agree that cheap branded kits can be a nightmare in terms of reliability so its a wise idean to buy decent kits in the first place. Of course there is no problem evaluating the different AP/Routers out there and some suppliers will even let you do this i.e. Return after 2 weeks.


Ashok.