My parents just finished moving into their new house, which is really cool because they designed it themselves. They also left it up to me to set up the home network, thus giving me a chance to try out a simple theory: the ease of wireless bridging.
The scoop: there are six ethernet jacks in the house. I had them pick up a Gigafast 8-port 10/100 switch ($20) and two Netgear 802.11b wireless access points and 4-port routers ($10 each -- they dropped another $10 in the last week). Additionally, my parents already have an Airport base station.
I decided to let the Airport do the routing, so I plugged it into the cable modem and switch in the basement and set the SSID and channel. I then popped one of the Netgears onto each floor, turned off DHCP, plugged the net into one of the LAN interfaces (not the WAN) interface, gave them a Airport-friendly IP, and set the SSID and separate channels. Even though one of the Netgear boxes was defective, this effectively created a nifty roaming network and the Macs simply connect to the closest AP available and are all on the same subnet behind the Airport router.
Anyway, after all this, I've finally reached that horrible point of the academic term where my coursework takes over my life and I have absolutely no chance of coding anything fun. Y'know, the point where there's an assignment due in 48 hours and you're actually worried about getting it done, but there's this burning idea or will to learn something new.
I also set up a Kwiki for a group project in one of my courses. The other group members claim to not be that computer-literate, but the person who wailed the most has already added stuff just fine. (Well done!)
