Bob Johnson wrote:
On Friday 25 February 2005 12:06 am, Christopher Kelley wrote:Well, 3-4 Mbps would be fine, as that's about what my broadband runs at anyways. At the risk of being pedantic, when you say 3-4 Mbps, do you mean including overhead or not? In other words, if you use say the bandwidth tester extension for firefox, would you expect to see 3-4 Mbps, or rather somewhat less than that due to overhead? I realize it may seem a stupid question, I just want to make sure I'm comparing apples to apples.
Have I tried too hard to squeeze usability out of an old computer?
I have a Pentium-166 that has been a faithful router & firewall (FreeBSD 5.3 and pf) for a couple years now. It has no trouble with the 3 to 4 Mbps I get from my broadband connection, at least not with ethernet.
I wanted wireless, so I could use my laptop around the house. I dutifully read the section in the manual about setting up FreeBSD as an access point. I'm using a Netgear MA311 802.11b card (Prism 2.5 chipset). And it does work, except it's very slow. Now I know that I can only expect about 50% of the rated speed with wireless, but I figured even if I got only 4Mbps, I'd be fine. But I get less than 1Mbps. I've updated the firmware, added a signal booster and hi-gain antenna, and I have "excellent" signal strength throughout my house.
So my question is, is there more overhead with wireless than with ethernet? TOP doesn't seem to show that I'm taxing it too hard, idle never goes below about 70% with polling enabled (Hz=1000), and never below about 80% with polling disabled. Am I expecting too much out of an old Pentium-166?
My experience is that:
1) 50% throughput is probably the best you should expect. I generally plan on 3-4 Mbps for an 11 Mbps 802.11b card.
2) Using 128-bit encryption (WEP) will significantly slow down some (many?) cards. The WEP processing is done on the card (I think), and they simply don't have hefty processors. If you use 128-bit WEP, try 64-bit WEP and see if that speeds things up. 64 bit WEP is adequate to keep out casual snoopers, and 128 bit is not adequate to keep out a serious attacker, so the difference in security may not be as important as some believe. 64-bit WEP is also known as 40-bit, and similarly for 128-bit WEP.
3) Turning on power management seriously slows things down for me, to well below 1 Mbps. Do a "wicontrol" and make sure Power Mgmt is "0".
- Bob
Just for testing, I turned off WEP completely, and verified that power management was off. No change. Drat.
Now I am wondering if it's very firmware sensitive. I'm using Primary 1.1.1 and Station 1.8.0 - I guess I could "downgrade" the firmware to either 1.3.4 or 1.4.9 - I had figured that more recent would be better, but now I'm wondering. The man page is 2 years old, though, so I don't know what versions were actually available when it was written.
Thanks for your help, I really do appreciate it, even if it doesn't actually "solve" my problem.
Christopher. _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
