On Saturday, July 09, 2011 12:48 AM, Ljubomir Ljubojevic wrote:
Christopher Chan wrote:
On Thursday, July 07, 2011 11:53 PM, Ljubomir Ljubojevic wrote:
Lamar Owen wrote:
The Apple Airport in an Intel Mac is Broadcom; many Intel Dell's have the option of Broadcom, which is typically less expensive than the 3945 or similar Intel wireless chipset. My Dell Inspiron 640m came with a Broadcom card; my Precision M65 had an Intel 3945 but has a Broadcom now (for other various reasons that are beyond the scope of the CentOS list).
The one AMD laptop I had that had PCIe wifi had an Atheros chipset..... but YMMV.
Intel, Broadcom, Ralink and Realtek chips are mostly used only for Laptops. Any decent (professional) Wireless router will have Atheros based radio. And the are excellent Atheros open source drivers.
Professional Wireless Router? That knocked me off my seat :-D. 'Wireless router' has become associated in my mind with that device you put in homes. So what professional wireless routers are out there? I have Aerohive 340 access points over here (uses Atheros btw) but I cannot seem to remember whether it supported routing but it does support tying profiles to vlans and a host of other stuff.
There are Wireless Access points (without routing capability) and only one wireless radio, semi-routers with only one wireless radio but with rudimentary routing and firewall/NAT support (most Ubiquity products) and there are full fledged routers with one or multiple LAN and wireless radios cards.
In the last group, most used is Mikrotik hardware with their RouterOS software that supports most of the routing protocols and extensive firewall/NAT/mangle capabilities. My favorite is StarOS software that runs on larger number of hardware platforms including regular PC's (as does RouterOS). There are other software/OS's but those 2 are, in my opinion, the best ones. Both of them support *only* Atheros chipsets.
And when I say routing, I mean RIP, OSPF, OLSR, BGP...
Bah, those for are sissies. I know of one chap who manually maintained the routing tables for checkpoint firewalls in a full mesh configuration and who had over 20 sites in that particular vpn network (works for a global conglomerate). Yes, I would be a sissy if I ever had to deploy a multi-site vpn network/multi-site network. :-P
From manufacturers, Winstron and Compex are most respected. This is
from 7 years of professional experience.
Let's see if we win the obscure wireless product awards ;)
I was refering to manufacturers of Atheros based radio cards, not routers. Sorry is I have not stated that clearly.
OIC.