How can I turn a PC into an Access Point?

I don't know of anything that will run on Windoze Server 2003 that will act as an access point unless you want to setup an ad-hoc network which has no access points and everyone connects to everyone else. Depending on what you're trying to accomplish, ad-hoc may be adquate.

Some of the older Orinoco drivers have a registry key called "APMode" that allows the driver to simulate an access point, but that probably will not run on Windoze Server 2003. I suspect that even if you could find an AP spoofing program, you might have driver difficulties with an internal PCI card. I don't think any of the card vendors even support Windoze Server 2003 for their drivers although I'm fairly sure that the XP NDIS5 drivers will work.

Ah, it's the challenge. I see...

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann
Loading thread data ...

I want to use a wlan-PCI card in my Windows Server 2003 as an Access Point. Can anybody point me in the right direction? I know it is faster, easier and very cheap to by en external access point, but this is not the point.

Reply to
Erik Palsbo

Not me. I already have too many challenges.

Sorta. NDISWrapper impliments the Windoze NDIS interface on Linux and allows the use of the Windoze drivers on Linux.

formatting link

Yep. HostAP for example:

formatting link
the current version also supports NDISWrapper drivers which allow it to be used with a wide variety of hardware besides the ones you mentioned.

Yep, but they don't use NDISWrapper. They really need the native driver support for the wireless chipset to keep the code size reasonable and for performance reasons.

The original challenge was to do it on Windoze Server 2003, which is basically Windoze XP with server features. I couldn't find an XP implimentation of something like HostAP.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Well if you want a challenge, convert from Windows to Linux and then if you have a suitable wireless card being an AP is easy. Exactly which driver you need depends on the card, and only some drivers support AP mode but all Prism 2/2.5/3 cards, Prism 54 cards, Intel 2x00 cards, Atheros cards and several others are all supported as APs. In fact if you look in many APs you will find Linux is what is driving them.

David _________________________________________ Usenet Zone Free Binaries Usenet Server More than 140,000 groups Unlimited download

formatting link
to open account

Reply to
David Goodenough

For that to work the windows driver would have to have AP functionality, and then it would work in windows as well. No you have to have a native linux driver with the specific AP functionality.

The hostapd (the d is important) support does support client authentication for ndiswrapper drivers that does not give you AP support.

As far as I know there is none. That is why I said you need to use Linux. David _________________________________________ Usenet Zone Free Binaries Usenet Server More than 140,000 groups Unlimited download

formatting link
to open account

Reply to
David Goodenough

Thanks Jeff and Dvid for reply. I had the feeling that this was not that easy. After all - it may not be a good idea for security reason, but I liked the idea of only one box.

Reply to
Erik Palsbo

Just to jump in and throw a little water on the fire, why would you want to covert a $300 or so computer into a $70 AP in the first place? I mean computers make really good calculators too, but I'd rather go to Kmart and pay $5.00 then convert my computer to the task .

Just a thought from the wet blanket crowd.

fundamentalism, fundamentally wrong.

Reply to
Rico

That and the fact that even my wife can reboot an AP (power off/on) :)

Much easier than trying to get her to remote diagnose a stuffed server.

David.

Reply to
David Taylor

If you read any of my rants in this snoozegroup, you'll find that I'm a big fan of seperate functions in seperate boxes. Usually, that means seperate boxes for the DSL/cable modem, for the router, and for the wireless access point. The reason is that each box wants to live in a different environment. The router and modem wants to live under a desk, in a close, buried in a basement, or other RF disgusting location. Meanwhile, the radio (access point) wants to live as high as possible and away from any sources of interference. These requirements are mutually incompatible.

This also applied to a server with a PCI wireless card. Actually, it's an even worse situation. The radio is next to the biggest source of interference. The antenna is shielded by a big metal computer box. It's also tangled among a bunch of cables and often buried under a desk or in a server closet. I could not think of a worse RF environment unless you want to bury it underground.

I'm not sure why you like the idea of having all your eggs in a Microsoft basket, but I would suggest you reconsider your preferences.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Even when it's easy, it's still lousy. Just about everybody who tries it soon moves on to a dedicated hardware base station. Having always-on, no-hassle wireless access is well worth the price.

Reply to
Neill Massello

Drivel: Once upon a time, in about 1984, I was helping out at a local PC clone dealer. I had written my first (and last) Turbo Pascal 2 program, which displayed an analog clock on a CGA screen. This was advanced programming in the days of 4.77Mhz computers. We had a genuine IBM PC in the store window running my program. People would walk by, stop, and set their watches by the time on the computer screen. The assumption was that a $3,000 computer clock was better than their $20 watch. Never mind that the computer clock would drift all over the place and was rarely accurate.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

It's really bad on all my laptops. I get rather tired of checking the time and date whenever I boot one of them. I've implimented an NTP update daemon, but that doesn't work if I don't have an internet connection. Also, if you want to see NTP belch some random corrections, turn on the "spread spectrum clock" feature in the bios.

I use NIST Time program:

formatting link
and tested by an agency of the US government. My tax dollars at work.

I won't mention my failed attempt to write a GPS NEMA-183 time sync program for my Unix box. It worked just fine until the antenna became ocluded and it started belching all zeros for the time. Made a huge mess of my log files and expired my entire usenet news spool directory. That incident convinced me I'll never be a programmist.

Incidentally, I mumbled in another posting that I had limited success using a OTP system on my PDA. That's because I could not maintain time sync between the cellular phone time and the NTP updated server time. I had to increase the window from 1 minute to 6 minutes to obtain sync. I've noticed that my PDA Phone (QCP-6035) is often 2-3 minutes off from the real time. My guess is that the PDA section is not getting properly updated from the phone section, but I've never bothered to investigate the problem.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann
[POSTED TO alt.internet.wireless - REPLY ON USENET PLEASE]

More Drivel(tm): Such thinking persists, even though PC clocks still drift all over the place. The drift bugs me so much that I run SymmTime 2005 (freeware , registration not required), which has lots of cool features to boot. Keeps my PC clock accurate to within about 100 ms even between external time syncs.

Reply to
John Navas
[POSTED TO alt.internet.wireless - REPLY ON USENET PLEASE]

Not necessarily A Good Thing (any of those things). :))

A nice thing about SymmTime 2005 is that it keeps track of clock drift, and applies corrections even when there isn't an external reference. As a result, even though the clock drift varies on my notebook (IBM ThinkPad T30), I seldom see more than a one second correction when reconnecting to the Internet.

Yikes! I consider that a silly and fairly serious flaw. Accurate time is inherent in CDMA.

Reply to
John Navas

I may have my dates off here (old minds begin to fade) but I recall you could dial into Ft Collins and capture the time in GW Basic and use that to set the PC clock. It seems like it was a 110 baud link the first time I did it. For some reason I recall doing this now and again in the early

80's. Whether it was a PC or XT I'm not sure, but I know before my first AT; I still miss that orignal AT keyboard :(

fundamentalism, fundamentally wrong.

Reply to
Rico

The program probably has secret messages sent back to Area 51 that informs the government of my subversive activities. Can't trust any organization, including the government, that hasn't survived a peer review of the source code. Oh, they do publish the source code: ftp://time.nist.gov/pub/daytime/ Well maybe we can trust the government, this time.

Yep. The cell phone time is synced with the cell site, which is synced with the SONET/SDH network or with GPS. I'm fairly sure it's accurate. They even sell CMDA clock time servers:

formatting link
seems to be my problem is that the Palm part of my PDA phone apparently does not regularly update the time from the cell phone part of the PDA. Apparently, there are two clocks in the phone. One for the cell phone part and one for the PDA part. How they are synchronized is not obvious (or documented). However, I've never really investigated the phenomenon and it might be something else.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

As always, YMMV. My comments were based on having actually used it (over a considerable period of time), and not being impressed with its stability (observed jitter on multiple trials), or with its coding (clumsy time server update). That's part of why I now use SymmTime.

Reply to
John Navas

Thanks again for all the reply. I do not disagree with the comments on how "smart" this solution might be or not be. This was more of an academic exercise. Fortunately not all ideas prove to be usable for operational purpose, but testing does no harm.

As to the battle between preachers of Microsoft versus Linux: no comments on religious matters from me.

By the way - I found that a product from Seque (SoftAP) is now bundled with some w-lan cards (ASUS WL-138G is one of the) and I am going to test that.

Thanks again everyone.

Erik

Reply to
Erik Palsbo

My GSM phone is probably accurate, if I let the system update it, but the darn thing is updated to ET, and I'm on AT! So I never let the system update it. otoh, my TDMA phone wasn't even capable of being updated from the cell system.

That's normal for your computer too. There's a hardware clock and a software clock. Normally they only sync up at boot time. The Palm clock is software, and _might_ be correctly updated from the cell-phone clock if you cycled the power

Reply to
Derek Broughton

Cabling-Design.com Forums website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.