Wifi

I had a few problems on my quest to install FreeBSD. There are technical solutions that would involve a bit of monkeying around with iptables and the like. The simplest way to solve them is to throw a little money at it. I found a used eero on eBay for $15 and will use that as a bridge on my existing network so that all of my computers can see each other whether they are on WiFi or Ethernet.

I pulled the server out of storage, put it in my office, plugged it in and connected a network cable to the iDRAC port. Based on the work yesterday, I was able to get connected and was able to start the server up. It’s running Ubuntu 20.04 now and i ran apt update && apt upgrade to patch it and make sure the network connection is stable to the Internet. The throughput isn’t great, but it worked.

As I wrote yesterday, I want to install BSD on a unused Dell server that I’ve got. Before I could get started with that, I had a problem. That problem was getting the server onto my network. It doesn’t have a WiFi card and I’m not sure how well BSD would work with a USB network interface. Since the eero is upstairs, that meant setting up a WiFi to Ethernet bridge.

I bought a cheap USB WiFi Adapter for my Ubuntu 22.04 system. I used to connect via a WiFi bridge running on DD-WRT but I’ve got this new Internet router from Cox cable that wasn’t being very cooperative with that, so I decided to replace it. I probably should have done a little bit more research. I just looked at the product descriptions for something that had Linux listed and figured that should be good enough.

I enjoyed this article describing the history of the venerable Linksys WRT54G. I had one of these running OpenWrt for years. It was extremely reliable and flexible. It was fun to hack around on it and I used the VPN quite freqently to get to files at home when I was travelling. Although I moved on years ago and now have an Eero with far superior speed and coverage, that ugly Linksys box was a great piece of hardware.