WAP, WAP, duWAP-11
I’m one of those early adopters – I bought one of the first NAT routers (the BEFSR41) and a wireless access point WAP11 1.0 (upgraded to firmware 1.4i) when they first came out. Pretty pricey at the time, but they served a need in my house – that is, not needing to string out cable all over the house over the number of computers we have, in different locations.
Finally, after 5 years or so, I upgraded my wireless access point to a WRT54G 3.0 (upgraded to firmware 4.20.6), they were cheap enough (around $70 CDN) and it had a lot more features that I needed (like Internet access blocking based on MAC address at certain times of the day for certain days), and there are a lot of alternative firmwares out there that have advanced features.
So what to do with the old BEFSR41 and WAP11? The WRT54G replaces both of those items. The BEFSR41 was still useful as a NAT router, or perhaps as a hub/switch if I could disable the NAT features. But what to do with the WAP11? I did not need two wireless access points.
I did some research on the Internet, and apparently the WAP11 can be used as a repeater or as a wireless client. Unfortunately, the repeater feature is not available in the WAP11 1.0 firmware. And judging from most of the posts online, it might not even work as a wireless client. I also thought, it would be useful to connect multiple PCs to the WAP11 so it could act as a bridge of sorts to the rest of the network. Apparently that’s what Linksys’ WET11 is for, and the WAP11 cannot do bridging apparently. With all this conflicting information in hand, I was discouraged but I ventured on anyway. Continue reading ‘WAP, WAP, duWAP-11’ »