In message <20020620211439.7821eba9.et@houseofet.com>, Ernst du Toit writes:
>In what sense do you find a real base station more convienent? Do you take it 
>with you between the office and home? The thought of tucking my i386 box under
> the arm vs a base station kinda makes me agree with you there :)
>
>Or does the base station manage connect and roaming better than a BSD box acti
>ng as an access point?
>

I was looking for a seamless experience....  It's not possible, as far 
as I know, to have a NetBSD machine act as a base station for BSS mode. 
That meant that I had to switch my laptop between BSS and ad hoc mode.  
The version of the Windows driver I had at the time wouldn't speak ad 
hoc.  NetBSD didn't support bridging, which was rather important 
because I was trying to get a bunch of machines into a /29, which meant 
that I couldn't really waste bits setting up separate subnets.  
Finally, the machine that was intended as the gateway is my -current 
machine, and is thus subject to more frequent reboots.

Things have changed.  There's IBSS mode, if you have the right card and 
firmware (I posted some NetBSD instructions on that a while ago).  
Newer Windows drivers do what I need, for those rare times when I'm 
running it.  And I believe there's bridging support in 1.6, though I 
haven't tried it yet.

Oh yes -- I do know several people who do travel with their base 
stations, and I've contemplated doing so myself.  So it's not out of 
the question.

		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb (me)
		http://www.wilyhacker.com ("Firewalls" book)