Tooling up my wireless junk
I’ve been making some major progress on my wireless gear lately. My house is now running enterprise class wireless gear – There’s a Nortel wireless security switch that can be had cheap, thanks to some corporate mergers EOLing the product line earlier than they planned.
Meet the Nortel 2270 wireless security switch:
This thing uses SX fiber to connect to my network and can manage something like 26ish access points. I’m running five or so around my house. I can create multiple SSIDs and assign them to seperate VLANs on my LAN. Thanks to that, I can leave an open wireless network for visitors and create a seperate, more secure but still restricted wireless network for my machines. My APs are Nortel 2230s – they do 802.11a/b/g.
On the client side, I finally remembered to purchase an ALFA network 500mw USB wireless card. That’s right – 500 milliwatts or 1/2 watt. To take advantage of this nifty card, I’m creating a virtuam machine on my macbook pro to run Backtrack 3 final. (There are other things, but this is a good excuse to set things up.)