When a Wireless Adapter Is Not a Wireless Bridge

Several weeks ago I was looked for a way to provide my desk laptop with 802.11g connectivity. Sometimes I operate two or three systems on my desk. I thought it might be helpful to purchase an 802.11g wireless bridge. Using the bridge, I could connect those multiple systems via Ethernet to the bridge, and have the bridge speak 802.11g to my Linksys wireless access point.

I had not had good experiences with 802.11b Linksys WET11 bridges, so I turned to NetGear. I noticed they sold the WGE111 54 Mbps Wireless Game Adapter pictured upper left. I thought, "I can buy that, connect it to a hub, and then connect wired systems to the hub." With a price around $50 after rebate this seemed like a great deal, especially compared to the NetGear WGE101, for $80 or more, pictured upper right. A competing product from Linksys, the WET54G costs about $120. (I do like the WET54GS5 that has a five port switch built into it, but that costs about $150.)

It turns out that the WGE111 will not support my requirements unless I trick it. The WGE111 appears to keep track of the MAC address of the wired side device and will not let more than one system connect to the wireless network at a time. The way to fool the WGE111 to support more than one wired client is to put the wired systems behind a small NAT gateway router. I guess I got what I paid for!

Incidentally, I perused the reference manual for the WET54GS5 and learned it supports one-to-one port mirroring. In other words, you can copy the traffic on one port to one other monitoring port. That is a nice way to gain access to traffic in a switched environment. I would like to see similar features in other low-end switches.

For the moment I don't plan to buy any wireless bridges. It would be nice if I could use the WRT54G, the cheap ($60 or less) wireless workhorse, in bridging mode. I found a how-to that relies on third-party firmware; more details here. I might try this.