![]() Setting up a wireless network shouldn't tax your problem-solving skills, but that could be exactly what happens if you opt for the solution from. Figuring out the setup problems is well worth it in this case, as the ORiNOCO solution, once it's installed, functions as well as its advertisements claim it does. In this review, we will fill you in on ORiNOCO's quirky setup software as well as some of the lacking documentation, which understates some of the most important elements of the installation. After reading these pointers on the ORiNOCO business solution, you should be able to perform a hassle-free installation for your enterprise. Software and documentation downloads for Proxim ORiNOCO and Lucent ORiNOCO/ WaveLAN 802.11b Gold/ Silver. The equipment we'll discuss here is: • • • • Our wireless network We installed all of this equipment using Windows 2000 Professional on and computers that were connected to a test network. Our building is a particularly difficult environment for wireless technologies because its construction is such that cell phones typically lose service connections within the walls. Even with the constraint of an unfriendly building, once installed, the ORiNOCO equipment was able to see the access point from various distances. The farthest point before the signal was reduced significantly was approximately 140 feet. The signal depreciated even more until it finally died at about 280 feet. When the quality was still in the acceptable range, network traffic stayed close to 11 Mbps, but when the laptop got more than 200 feet away from the access point, it dropped to around 5 Mbps. While the equipment performed well once it was installed, getting to that point took some work. Much of our aggravation stemmed from a lack of experience with this hardware and software. To avoid this during your installation, make sure you have the most up-to-date drivers for your systems. We ended up with three or four different install CD-ROMs and while they seem to be updated on a regular basis, if the date is older than six months, it may be worth a trip to the ORiNOCO Web site to download the updates. One other general oddity that needs mentioning is that we were never able to get the Access Point 500 to access our test network through a hub. It would work fine when directly plugged into the test network, but not being able to use the hub complicated our setup and implementation. After completing this review, we found that our problem was because the port on the Access Point 500 is 10 Mbps and the particular hub we were using was only 100 Mbps. Of course, in all the client computers, the network properties had to be configured after the client device (card or USB client) was installed. Accessing the Access Point The ORiNOCO Access Point 500 is a small beige box that contains an ORiNOCO Gold PC Card on a circuit board with an AMD computer chip. On the bottom of the box is an RJ-45 port, a power cable port, and two inset buttons for resetting or reloading the configuration on the access point (see Figure A). Figure A The ORiNOCO Access Point 500 connects the wired and wireless networks. The instructions indicate that when the access point powers up, it should have a set of default settings that will allow you to access the configuration file in order to customize settings, like its IP address, from the included AP Manager tool. Configuring the Access Point 500 from a wired network requires that the AP Manager tool be installed on the administration machine. Our situation was complicated by the fact that the access point would not go through our hub. The obvious solution was to stick a PCMCIA card, the ORiNOCO Silver PC Card, into a laptop along with the AP Manager program to access the Access Point 500 (see Figure B). Figure B The ORiNOCO Silver PC Card provides the connection to the access point. To install the PC Card, the documentation recommends installing the Client Manager software first and then inserting the PC Card into the PCMCIA slot on the laptop. Before inserting the card, we installed the Windows 2000 driver, which is a separate button under the Install Software portion of the Install CD. When we inserted the card, the Plug and Play feature in Windows asked us to find the driver, which we did by browsing on our hard drive until we found the driver in the ORiNOCO folder in the Program folder. Hint: If the Wireless Network Control Panel applet doesn't show up in the Control Panel, you won't be able to configure your PC Card to find the access point. We had to uninstall the driver and reinstall it before we were able to access the configuration file for the PCMCIA card. Another hint: The Network Name on the PC Card and the Access Point 500 has got to be the same, or they will never be able to talk to each other. By default, they are supposed to be the same at original startup, but ours differed. Our access point was essentially isolated because we couldn't get to it via wireless connection or through the wired network because the hub was preventing a network connection.
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January 2019
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