Wireless home network

Some right useful info about setting up my own wireless home network from mate at www.itchypaws.co.uk... Posting it up here so I don't delete the email again, and just in case it's useful to anyone else!

I have the following router (I think I sent this through before?): www.netgear.co.uk/html/prod_routers_adsl.htm#dg834g

Full HTML datasheet can be found here.

In summary, it supports the following:
- VPN passthrough
- One machine in a DMZ
- Hardware (SPI) Firewall
- MAC Address filtering
- WEP Encryption including 64-bit (40-bit) and 128-bit (104-bit)
- 802.11g and 802.11b (simultaneously)
- Network Address Translation
- It's a wireless access point
- It's a router
- It's an ADSL modem

I bought ours from www.savastore.com/ which was the cheapest at the end of November - you can probably get it cheaper elsewhere now, although when I looked last month for someone else, I couldn't find it any cheaper? Oh yeah, it also received the PC Plus Editor's Choice award last month...

It's been rock solid since we turned it on too and is very easy to configure and I can even get MSN Messenger video and audio calls to work over it now they fixed a bug in the firmware.

Some routers come with a print server in-built but I personally wouldn't touch them - the NetGear one above doesn't. I think it's far better just to buy either a wireless print server box (they're tiny) or a wired one which connects directly to your router (if you can put your router somewhere near your printer then that's probably the better and far cheaper option). I did a fair bit of research into these last month for a mate - I'll try to remember to dig out the email at home tonight. You can get either USB or parallel ones though with one or two ports. Some even come with a USB and parallel port. Might just be worth leaving the print servers until after you buy the router though as you might find you don't need one?

I have the following PCMCIA card for my laptop which is about 32 GBP inc. VAT at SavaStore.com: NetGear WG511GE 802.11g 54Mbps Wireless PCMCIA Card

And the folllowing PCI card for my desktop machine: Belkin F5D7000UK 54g Wireless Desktop PCI Interface Card

I wouldn't bother getting anything less than a 802.11g card these days (802.11b will slowly die out) - you'll only regret it in the long run.

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