Will an early Pentium really work for CPE?

[courika]

Sorry if this is the wrong forum (I really don't know what SBC stands for), but I'm looking to replace my WET11s with StarOS CPE units running on Pentium 133/166 PCs with Orinoco PCMCIA cards w/PCI adapters. Sounds complicated, but it's probably the cheapest solution I've found for a decent CPE solution.

I'd love to use the SmartBridge units, but they're a litttle pricey for me. For bang for the buck, I'm thinking cheap PCs are the way to go. However, I worry that I'll run into mucho problemos. Ideas? Comments? Advice?

Any help will be appeciated...

Thank you

Sean

[tony]

SBC = "Single Board Computer".

A Pentium 133/166 should work quite well. The software requires 64MB of RAM minimum, or 16MB if you are intending to use the CPE Desktop Edition.

Note that not all early Pentium computers work with PCI CardBus sockets, in that they do not assign IRQs to the slots. A solution to this is to replace the PCI adapters with an ISA pcmcia socket, or a supported PCI Prism 2.5 card, which do work well in these systems.

Thanks!

[courika]

Tony,

Thank you for the reply. Would you be willing to recommend a particular brand and model (maybe even a couple) of Prism 2.5 cards that I should look for? There are TONS of cards on the market, and it's tough to figure out which ones are supported and which aren't.

Thank you

[lonnie]

I would ask list members to reply to this. We have not had prism2.5 gear for a long time now and we really do not know what is available, since the chipsets tend to change in the radios.

All we use for an AP is the Orinoco cards, since they have the best firmware. We have a special right now and surprisingly very few people have seen it or taken advantage of it. A 10 pack of the single PCMCIA and an Orinoco ruby card includes 10 Router licenses for the old 10 pack price of $950. So that provides the radio and interface for $45 if you remove the $50 license. It won't last forever and we only have about 100 left, so they will go fairly quickly.