General Questions

So my current home setup uses a netgear WGT624v3 so my parents can connect to the net via wireless (it is an access point and a router). If I used a m0n0wall box with 3 network cards, one to my switch, one to the internets, and one to the router, would I still be able to get wireless to access the rest of the network?

What possibilities are here in the way I can set this up? How hard would it be?

The hardware I intend to use for the router will be a standard PC with 2/3 NICs. Is this okay?

Thanks :]

edit: Upon reading more, it appears pfSense may be more of what I'm lookingfor (due to using a desktop PC) but either way, I think my question still applies. - Can a wireless router be used as an AP?

Yes you can. You'll probably want to bridge the wireless over to the OPT port on your firewall. How to do that depends on the AP, I'm not familiar with the Netgears.

I have my network set up similarly, all you should need to do is disable the wireless router's DHCP server (unless you have it handling DHCP instead of m0n0wall), and give it a static LAN IP you'll remember to change its settings.  You should then be able to plug one of the wireless router's LAN ports into one of the ports on the switch and not even need to use the 3rd NIC (this should also allow you to use the router as a second switch, giving you more LAN ports).  Make sure one of the devices supports auto-sensing/switching or you may need a crossover cable.

What Cyraan posted sounds correct, and like what you'll want. That's the same way the Linksys AP's I've done this with in the past work. Just don't plug the WAN into the OPT interface of m0n0wall, or you'll be double NAT'ing. That's unnecessary overhead, and undesirable.

You could plug it into your LAN, but I prefer and would suggest using an OPT port because it gives you much better control over your wireless segment. If you plug it into an OPT port you can control what wireless clients can access on your LAN.

As long as your firewall machine is a PII or better, it'll definitely be fast enough to not slow down your wireless between LAN and OPT, if you need to access things like file servers where the full throughput is desired.

I have the same setup at home, except with an SMC wlan router.  I disabled DHCP, NAT, and all packet filtering features plus ran the uplink from the M0n0wall box into one of the switch ports on the SMC.