Wireless/Mobile /

More networking, less wires

By Mark Gibbs
Network World, 10/22/01

We were thwarted. We were going to review a cool product as promised last week but . . . well, the PC we were using bit the big one and stymied our endeavors. But, miracle of miracles, we were investigating something else that we think you will be equally agog over (we will return to our intended target in the next few weeks).

The something else we have been having fun with, er, evaluating is 802.11b wireless Ethernet, specifically the Orinoco products from Agere Systems (www.orinocowireless.com).

Agere is a Lucent spinoff, and we checked out its client PC Card, external Univeral Serial Bus client module and its AP-500 Access Point. We were very impressed. The Agere gear is similar to competing products (see our review of Linksys), but Agere can offer some interesting options because it uses the Hermes chipset, which allows you to run something called Netstumbler that we'll discuss in a while.

The client-side products were easy to install, but the access point we received was a different matter entirely. Another reviewer somehow had damaged the access point. Unfortunately, the diagnostics and documentation were so poor that we couldn't easily determine that the problems weren't our own fault. Thus after two hours (at 2:30 a.m.), we gave up the struggle with the AP-500 and went to bed.

When we spoke to Agere's product manager the next day he admitted to deficiencies in the documentation (and that he had never read the documentation anyway!) and concurred with our diagnosis of a faulty unit. A replacement arrived a few days later and what a difference. A properly working Orinoco AP-500 Access Point is a breeze to install.

Agere has a great product in the AP-500, but the documentation and management software needs a complete rework to make problem diagnosis and maintenance operations effective.

The client management software for the Orinoco cards is well designed and lets you create up to four profiles that can be dynamically selected. This means you can switch from, say, an infrastructure configuration to a peer-to-peer to a residential gateway as needed without much effort (although forcing a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol refresh to get a new IP address on profile change would be a good idea).

The access point management software (when you have a properly working unit) is very good, letting you configure, update and monitor any access point from a workstation on your network. You can control which protocols are filtered, which media access control addresses are allowed access and configure standard security features and proprietary features, such as 128-bit encryption and Orinoco's own access controls. We'd like to see the ability to simultaneously set the parameters of multiple access points to simplify management in larger wireless networks.

From an IT viewpoint, wireless connectivity with 802.11b is pretty cool (it is even more cool from a user viewpoint - instant connection, no wires - heaven!). But there are security implications. With that in mind, we loaded an amazing piece of freeware called Netstumbler and went scouting.

Netstumbler, written by Marius Milner, scans and logs the name, signal strength and other technical details of any 802.11b wireless networks it finds. Better yet, if you have a Global Positioning System you can plug that into the PC running Netstumbler and log the location of all discovered networks. This is starting to be called "war driving" (remember "war dialing" to find dial-up network access servers? This is the wireless equivalent). Way cool. This means that for IT managers, finding all those unauthorized wireless points is now easy.

With Netstumbler running on a laptop outfitted with a $159 Orinoco Gold PC Card (which can handle 128-bit encryption, whereas the company's $99 Silver PC Card only supports 64-bit encryption), we set out at midnight for a tour around our sleepy little town to find out what 802.11b nets were visible.

We got about one-eighth of a mile down our street when it turned out one of our neighbors has a live wireless setup. Smart people, they have encryption enabled. Not so for the other 12 networks we found in a six-mile drive downtown. We have yet to go back to these nets and explore them, but we suspect most are open by accident rather than intentionally.

"Intentionally?" you might expostulate. "Why would anyone let just anyone else use their network for free?"

Ah, gentle reader, that's a question we'll answer next week. . . . All other questions to gearhead@gibbs.com.