WLAN@home
Since I received my IBM Thinkpad T40 with WLAN on board there was a deep voice in me that kept on saying
‚You need WLAN at home, you need WLAN at home…‘
Last friday was the end of a busy week and the voice inside me said
‚Buy a WLAN DSL router NOW !‘
I checked a few online issues of PC magazines. Then I checked the availability at the local preferred store.
Here we go, I bought the SMC Barricade 7004 VWBR (a.k.a ‚Fluckskompensator‘).
One thing that I don’t like on any powerdriven machine is the absence of a ‚Power‘ switch. I want to switch off machines. I don’t want to unplug them.
The rest is fine. The case is slim with two antennas. There is only a english printed manual, but on the CD are pdf-manuals in more languages. I was surprised that a RJ45 Ethernet cable was included. OK, that’s all in the box.
After a little research in my homeoffice I found my T-DSL username and password. I needed it only one time when I set up my Linux based router…
The SMC device is a four port switch (10/100 Mbps), NAT router, firewall and DHCP Server. It supports only 801.11b (11 Mbit) which is ok for me at home.
The setup (webinterface) was fast and I had no problems with it. I enabled WEP encryption, configured the notebook with IBM Access Connection and surfed the web from the living room which put a smile on my face. The rest of my homenetwork (W2K PC, Linuxserver and iMac) was connected by cable to the ports. Every client received an IP address and was able to surf the web.
Maybe I disable the DHCP server and move this task back to the Linuxserver. I like to assign IP address by MAC address and use my own DNS server but on the SMC device you can only set the addresspool, leasetime and the domainname.
Did I mention that this thing has no powerswitch ?
Since I received my IBM Thinkpad T40 with Windows XP there is a deep voice in me that keep on saying
‚You need a PowerMac with OS X. You need a PowerMac with OS X…‘