I just threw a wireless card in my firewall, Pipboy (named after Pipboy 2000 from the Fallout video game. They appear about the same level of technology). Geekness behind the cut.


I didn’t think this would be easy. Pipboy is running OpenBSD, which I’m not hugely familiar with outside of messing with the firewall and and its relation to FreeBSD (which I am quite familiar with). I haven’t played much with changing hardware, and I’ve never done anything with wireless under any *nix OS. Also, out of all the wireless cards in most stores right now, most are supported but only one (1) can be used in “host AP” mode to host connections from laptops and such (Linksys WMP54G, 49.99 at Circuit City). Much to my delight, it was cake to configure. In windows, I’m used to opening a maze of windows to set up wireless connections in the event WindowsMagic(tm) fails to do everything automatically. After putting in the card it was 2 command lines to get everything working fine. one to set up the ip/netmask, operating mode (setting it up to accept connections as an access point), channel, etc. And one to set the WEP key. After that and a few minutes spent adding the appropriate NAT and filter rule lines to packet filter, I was able to connect with both my laptop and my handheld. Surprisingly painless.

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  1. May 25th, 2006 at 15:35 | #1
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