General Questions

A new Soekris net5501-70 will soon be arriving in the mail, which I plan to install the latest m0n0 1.3 beta on (currently 1.3b10). I'm interested in adding 802.11g AP capability to the device as I don't want to fork out for a separate AP at this time. It looks like I have a number of options including the mini-PCI slot and USB, however I thought I'd check with the forum to see if anyone has some hardware recommendations or best practices as I've never done this sort of tinkering before.

Any advice would be appreciated, thanks in advance!

netgate.com has a lot of wireless cards to choose from.  Most of them are used by professional wireless ISPs. 

If this is for home use, do NOT get a big high powered card.  Trust me. Better antennas are far more valuable and effective.  (You can blast your AP very loudly, but if it can't hear the clients, it is of no use)

Aaron

P.S. make sure you use Atheros cards

Netgate usually has footnotes on which cards are compatible with what, too.  They sell single board computers with m0n0wall of pfsense pre-installed.

Aaron

Thanks for the tips.

Looking through netgate.com I see the Ubiquiti XtremeRange2 which sounds like a pretty good card based on the 6th gen Atheros AR5414 chipset. I'm not sure this chipset is supported by the current 1.3b10 release of m0n0 however, as m0n0 is based on FreeBSD 6.2p9 but I don't know if the 6.2 docs are based on p9 or something later on.

If anyone has a recommended product/chipset that definitely works with m0n0 1.3b10 I'd love to hear about it.

Can I ask what you are going to use your WiFi for?  If this is for home, I'd stick with a CM9 or something (semi-educated recommendation).

the XR2 is only necessary if you are doing 10+ mile links!  Actually, your soekris probably cannot support the power requirements.  (It takes 6.5 watts at maximum power)

Aaron

Well I saw that the XR2 with the right antenna can reach over 50km, but I don't think that kind of antenna would even fit in my apartment! 

Currently I'm just trying to implement a stable, secure, high-performance routing/wireless switching infrastructure in my apartment. Client devices include two laptops, 2 Blackberry 8820's, an HTPC and a file server. My upstream link is 20Mb/s cable and my file server often maxes it out when downloading, consumer-grade solutions I've tried (Linksys, D-Link, Netgear) have all given me stability problems which is why I'm going to the m0n0wall-on-Soekris approach. I'm building a house this year and will likely go with multiple Cisco Aironet acccess points (I get a great deal on used gear through work) but until then I thought I'd try the miniPCI AP approach.

I'm willing to spend more to get a high power, highly sensitive and above all rock-solid wireless card for the Soekris, which is why I was looking at the XR2. When I check the datasheet for the XR2, it seems to draw about the same current as the CM9 at 54Mb/s and both operate at 3.3V so it would seem to me they draw about the same power? My high school electronics classes are well behind me so it's possible I'm using these numbers incorrectly.

Two other bonuses of the XR2 over the CM9 are that the XM2 supports WPA2, and has the more durable MMCX antenna (less of a concern), but of course neither of these are much good to me if the card doesn't have enough juice to run, or melts the Soekris!

The XR2 is 600mW and the CM9 is 63mW!!!  If you plug that XR2 in, your signal will be seen and interfere with other networks for miles.  Most consumer APs are 30mW. 

But, I'm not sure if using m0n0 or pfSense is the best solution for wireless. m0n0 is a firewall, if you need serious wireless performance, get an AP platform.

802.11g has a datarate of UP TO 54mbps, but the usable is usally 20mbps or less.  That is 20mbps HALF-Duplex as well.  Your stability problems are probably just that you are saturating the airwaves or there is interference (very likely in an apt).  So if you are using all 20mbps to upload, you have no download airtime left to even surf the web.  You either need to shape the traffic into 20mbps TOTAL upload and download (I don' t know how to do this) or else you need 802.11n or to wire things up.

Sounds like you are running a TON of traffic wirelessly.  I would go 802.11n to eliminate your local netework that as a bottleneck.  N also gives you much better range for your apt or house.  The D-Link 655 is the best performing consumer AP out there (with Apple AirPort close behind).  I don't think you would need anything more than that.  Commercial 802.11n APs are very expensive and there are very few out there.  D-Link recently released the 855 which has 5ghz support.  2.4GHz has better penetration, but there is not much spectrum available and it it very crowded with other WiFi and cordless phones. 5ghz will allow you to hit 70mbps with 802.11n "Turbo" mode (using 40MHz of spectrum instead of 20MHz).  Don't even try to go Turbo on 2.4GHz because there is only 60MHz of spectrum total. You will kill your neighbors.  smallnetbuilder.com has great reviews and tests for consumer wireless APs.
 
You may want to hit up the WISP forum on dslreports.com (dslreports.com/forum/wisp).  That's where I've learned much about what I just told you.

Aaron

Thanks for the continued assistance. The trouble I'm having now is definitely the result of my D-Link DGL-4300 wireless router. It used to run fine, then it slowly started degrading performance under heavy torrent download until it would lock up and forget its configuation settings(!), which is now does routinely and even modest torrent traffic causes it to reset all wireless connections every minute or so. I've experienced similar slow deaths from Linksys and Netgear equipment in the past as well, which is why I decided to try a step up with a Soekris device running m0n0wall.

I found this FAQ entry when I first started reading up on m0n0, which alludes to m0n0 1.3 being considerably better suited to using as a wireless access point (not only for improved device compatibility but an improved hostap), so I figured I'd give it a try both for fun and to get a bit of experience using FreeBSD. From what you're saying though, I could get a flawless 802.11g setup and it still wouldn't be enough to handle the 20Mb/s traffic I'm capable of moving from my ISP.

Clearly I need to wire the file server to the network, which I've been unable to do for years due to the wife acceptance factor (our cable comes into a closet near the front door while the file server is in the opposite end of the apartment). I'll start working on that sales job immediately.   

In the meantime I'll take your advice and start looking a separate AP, but I want to steer clear of the consumer gear I've used in the past. Please let me know if you have any recommendations on this front, and again many thanks for the continued assistance!