Unixwiz.net - Steve Friedl's Weblog: Wireless laptopping

March 27, 2003

Wireless laptopping

Well I have finally entered the 21st century: I'm now operating wireless.

I've had an old 400MHz Dell laptop that I used mainly for network testing, but I finally got an 802.11b wireless router and PCMCIA card, and I can't believe how much I love it. I mainly use it just to secure-shell to my Linux boxes and to do web surfing and IM, and it's plenty fast for that. I also fire up my RadioMX streaming music service and sit on the back porch laptopping with the backyard birds. The female scrub jay ate from my hand yesterday.

What really helped was getting good batteries: I got a killer price on two units from Pacific Battery Systems, and I get more than 8 real hours of life. They're having a special now on these batteries ($109 for 3800 mAh batteries). And they have 4460 mAh batteries available as well - these power densities are just amazing.

I've also done a bit of wardriving and am amazed how many systems close to me are wide open. With Netstumbler and my soon-to-arrive wardriving kit with external antenna, I should have quite a bit of fun.

Wireless rocks.

Posted by Steve at March 27, 2003 09:41 AM | TrackBack

Comments

I did the same thing a month or two ago and was quite pleased with the results... even went so far as to set up SSH port forwarding to my Squid server in temporary lieu of WEP. And yeah, there are a *lot* of unsecured, default networks out there. BTW, if you really want to live up to the UnixWiz name, run Kismet (http://www.kismetwireless.net/) or bsd-airtools (http://www.dachb0den.com/projects/bsd-airtools.html)...

Posted by: Kyle Maxwell on March 28, 2003 05:24 AM

Well I'm secure enough in my manhood that I don't mind using whatever OS works for me, and it turns out that Windows 2000 on my laptop has served me very well. That I love using Windows doesn't make unixwiz.net an unwarranted appelation.

But for an unrelated project I need Linux on a laptop, so today I bought a 30G hard drive for my Dell, and I'm setting up a dual-boot environment with GRUB: booting Red Hat 8.0 and Windows 2000. I've not done a dual-boot in a very long time, so we'll see how many reinstalls I have to do before I get it right.

Once I get it working, I'll try the Linux-based stumbling tools.

Posted by: Steve Friedl on March 28, 2003 03:06 PM