[K12OSN] K12LTSP wireless?

Petre Scheie petre at maltzen.net
Fri Nov 18 13:58:59 UTC 2005


Doubtful.  I think the consensus these days is that one should use a gigabit card for 
eth0.  Using a 100Mbit card for eth0 will work for up to perhaps 10 or 15 clients, but 
even that assumes you are using a switch which keeps each client's traffic separate from 
all others.  Wireless is shared bandwidth, and loses more of its bandwidth to overhead. 
  Even with 802.11g and proprietary compression, you won't get anywhere near fast 
ethernet's 100Mbit (which doesn't really deliver 100Mbit either).  If you want to do 
wireless, I'd suggest having a few clients connect via wire to an access point that is 
in bridging mode, and have one card in the server for each access point, and put each 
AP/wireless-card-in-server pair on a different channel.  There are 11 channels to choose 
from but they overlap, so to get enough 'space' between the channels, you really only 
can use channels 1,6, and 11.  That means you can support three APs.  That's using 
802.11g which operates in the 2.4Ghz band.  Then if you repeat that setup using 802.11a 
equipment, which operates in the 5Ghz band, but isn't as commonly found, you should be 
able to add a few more.  I'm doubtful that you'll get to 25 clients, though.

I'd start small, with say five clients and then work up from there.  Oh, and having the 
clients work directly with a wireless card will be hard.  The client boot image only 
supports one or two cards, and hasn't been updated for a while.  You'll have more 
success if you run a wire from the client to an access point which then connects to the 
server.

Petre

Dan Hopson wrote:
> OK...I guess what I am wanting to do is have a wireless NIC only on eth0 
> and wireless NICs in the terminal machines...is this feasible with 25 
> terminals?
> 
> Dan.
> 
> 
>> From: Petre Scheie <petre at maltzen.net>
>> Reply-To: "Support list for opensource software in schools." 
>> <k12osn at redhat.com>
>> To: "Support list for opensource software in schools." 
>> <k12osn at redhat.com>
>> Subject: Re: [K12OSN] K12LTSP wireless?
>> Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 07:53:48 -0600
>>
>> Perhaps but not necessarily; there are a lot of cards out there.  
>> Since you reference eth0 and eth1, are you thinking of putting 
>> wireless cards in the server?  I see two problems with that plan: 1) 
>> wireless bandwidth, which is shared, won't handle many client 
>> connections before it gets saturated; 2) running a wireless card in 
>> the server suggests you want to try wireless clients, which isn't very 
>> feasible at this point.  A package was made a year or two ago that 
>> would work with some wireless client cards, but the list is quite 
>> short.  It's kind of a catch-22: to talk to the wireless card, there 
>> has to be support for PCMCIA, but to do that you have to have a kernel 
>> loaded, but to load a kernel you have to have networking working which 
>> means supporting PCMCIA, and so on.
>>
>> More information on what you want to do would be helpful.  Tell us 
>> what you have in mind.
>>
>> Petre
>>
>> Dan Hopson wrote:
>>
>>> I am just getting started with Linux networking.  Will K12LTSP work 
>>> with all wireless NICs on both eth0 and eth1?
>>>
>>> Thanks, Dan.
>>>
>>>
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> 
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