OK, I'm in  a bit of a quandry....

My needs, wants, and an offer of help:

1.  I need to have 2 WiFi APs at the house.  I have a Netgear WGT624v3, an old SMC 2652W, and a Belkin F5D6130.  A bit of good news about the Belkin:  you can get your money back for what is essentially a brick.  Visit the Belkin site and search under support for the refund program.

I am giong to try and reflash the SMC to run linux., but I have not much hope for that....  The openap project is all but dead, and my attempts to reflash it so far have met with stubborn failure....  The SMC doesn't do WEP at all....  and as I live across from two schools, including a tech/computer magnet school, I need WiFi security....

I would like to reflash the Netgear but it's a v3, which is a WiP and doesn't work acording to the wiki....  Now I do embedded development for a living (although on ARM hardware), and I am willing to spend a bit of time on that, so if anyone can give me some pointers on the Netgear I can take a stab at it.  Mostly on how to get connected to the bloody thing in the first place.  My netgear doesn't look like the pics in the wiki....  (The problem with the Netgear is that you can't turn off NAT, which means I can't use NFS over WiFi....  PITA).

2.  I want to set up an AP in the travel van.  I am really leaning towards the WRTSL54GS, except that it doesn't have a removable antenna.  Before I plop down a $100 for this thing, can the antenna be unsoldered and relocated?  I want to completely hide the AP from prying eyes...

The idea is to have 2GB MTD storage via USB for trip reports, pics, etc. on the AP, and for the AP to a) assign DHCP addresses and manage security inside the van, and b) to automagically connect to any hotspots on the way, tunnel into my home server, and upload said pics and trip reports automagically as bandwith permits, probably via rsync over ssh.....

So, I need a) usb and b) a removable antenna, even if it means de-soldering.

3.  Since many of these APs have serial headers, has anyone added an LCD screen?  I can't see it being that difficult, and it would definitely be very, very cool.

I would appreciate any comments, suggestions, and pics of the internals of the WGTSL54GS....

Thanks,

--Yan

Hi Yan,

Actually I can help a little with the wgt624v3. (well maybe you'll be helping us more but ...).

The situation is this, madwifi hals are not available at present for any of the SOC chips that use AHB to connect the radios, which is all of them. However there is some work being done on getting them ready if a compatible hal does become available.
I am specifically working on the RedBoot bootloader for atheros based devices. If you can supply some information about the internals of this device specifically the flash chip (it's a SPI flash probably), the ram, and the switch type. I can then make a redboot image that runs in ram for testing.

As to what device you should use today, a wgt634u would be my suggestion.

Mike

OK, here's some moderate quality pics of my Netgear:

http://www.seiner.com/blog/Travels/?p=164

Enable popups and click on the pics; for full resolution save the image from the popup window....

HTH, and let me know what else I can provide....

--Yan

(Last edited by cptdondo on 12 Apr 2006, 02:59)