WET11 FYI

[bobbyc]

I was wondering the thruput of a WET11. I have a older dell pentium pro 128mb or ram but I can't use pcmcia cards in it because of the way the pci slots assign IRQ slots or something... so I threw a NIC in there and hooked it up to a WET11 with 1.1.1/1.7.4 software. I associated it to a hermes card in a celeron 700 128mb ram machine that was in the same room with a hermes card as AP (same cpu has a backhaul card to another tower.) From the NIC cpu, the TCP throughput at rx was 645KBps, and the tx was 585 KBps. That is pretty similar with what they were saying at this article here that the WET11 gets just above 5mbps.
http://www.80211-planet.com/reviews/CD/article.php/1556351
I put a ruby card with 8.72 firmware in the WET11 and it was actually slower. In 15 seconds of time it only crept up to about 610KBps rx even though it had ample signal. the tx was holding steady at 585KBps, just like the prism WET11.
For my next trick, WET11s/NICs at both ends.
Bob C

[georgew]

What speed is your pentium pro?

It takes a lot of interrupt servicing to handle the full speed load of a standard 802.11b card. The wet11 probably does not use interrupts, so it has an advantage. The wet11 probably just shoves wireless packets onto the ethernet, so it should always run at "wire speed".

[bobbyc]

It's a 200mhz pentium pro.
The problem with the pentium pro cpu is detailed here:
http://forums.star-os.com/viewtopic.php?t=345&highlight=pentium+pro
Hey Tony/lonnie, will the recent support for PLX pci cards solve this problem?
Bob C

[bobbyc]

On a different note, but still a WET FYI;
Firmware 1.54 for the WET11 is now at http://www.linksys.com/download/firmware.asp?fwid=170
There is also a new setup driver at
http://www.linksys.com/download/driver.asp?dlid=75

In the release notes for the firmware it mentions, among other things, improved DHCP support for linux
What do you think that means?
Bob C

[Anymouse]

We had to update all of our client WET11 units with the new firmware in order for our implementation of DHCP to bridge properly. We were using a Sun Cobalt Qube 3 as our dhcp server. Ended up having to statically address the WET11 units themselves - as they were periodically dropping off the network, requiring a hard reboot to come back.

[georgew]

In my tests, the WET11 would loose arpresolution to the network, and stop arping for it's client. If I would try to push pings through the wet11 from both directions, it would eventually wake up on it's own. I was unable to find a pattern that would make it work, but no luck.

Now thinking back, one of the things about the way I used the wet11, I was simply using it as a bridge to an AP. The wet11 was using it's default address, so it had no IP on the network it was bridging. I don't know if this was causing the arp problem.

I see so many arp problems I tend to shrug them off, but I have seen a pattern of this sort of problem with cheaper wireless AP's, it could be a common reason why these devices have arp issues... It may be a prism firmware flaw common to all of the devices I was testing.

[bobbyc]

George,
In our implementation, if the AP is 10.0.0.2, then the WET11 is 10.0.0.20 and the cpu or router behind the WET11 is 10.0.0.21. We have never had a WET11 customer complain. We use the agere short cards in our WET11s.
Bob C

[georgew]

That was a theory I had about the wet11 failures, that it was just an issue of the wet11 not knowing about the layer3 network.

A follow-on question is what will it do when there is no IP traffic at all, because you are running pppoe...

Perhaps I'll drag a wet11 back out and test it with pppoe running through it at some point...

[bobbyc]

Interesting...
I had a quick question: Why is it that when I ping my WET11 clients(whether it has the stock radio in it or a hermes radio) from the AP, the largest packet size I can ping with is 1450? When I ping a usb client, I can go much higher and it will ping. Anything higher than 1450 to the WET11 and nothing happens.
Thanks,
Bob C