[olug] what I do for wireless

[Neal Rauhauser]

  This isn't under the $100 mark, but they pretty much kick butt:

  I start with a Soekris 486/100 single board computer ...

http://soekris.com/net4511.htm

  And I add a +21 - +23dBm wireless card from Netgate - it says 200mw, 
but radios are never that precise in terms of output - you can expect 
somewhere between 125mw and 200mw.

http://www.netgate.com/product_info.php?products_id=43&osCsid=39f36602a839d61694686f50ebb117ee

  There are several operating system installation procedures documented, 
but I found the OpenSoekris script to be the best for my needs. I 
started working with it using OpenBSD 3.4 and I found some issues with 
OpenBSD 3.6 that have kept me using the older version. They weren't 
insurmountable issues, but I didn't want to fiddle with kernel configs 
and such each time I built a new image.

 http://opensoekris.sourceforge.net/

  I've had two locations that each had a pair of these things for doing 
a parking lot crossing job and I recently installed a four node cell of 
them. The center to the cell was a Soekris machine, but it recently got 
upgraded to a Cisco 1231 AP  - OpenBSD does not support WPA and we want 
to use this because the cell will expand to handle iPaqs running Windows 
Mobile(choke! puke!).

 I've recently started trying to get FreeBSD 5.4 running on the system 
but the netboot procedure detailed on that link from the Soekris site 
has me totally confused. We'll see how far I get, since Cisco has turned 
up the heat on featues in the 12xx series and they've fixed the 
reliability problems that plagued the 350 series.