My friend David Gillette,

  Since first I merely conceived of purchasing some PC's running Win95 and
installing a home network for our 4 very young children - that really is
frightfully long ago - you have been sharing priceless information and
intuition into how these PC's actually work.  Again, I discover that I'm to
be grateful to you for your attentions and abilities.

  The two devices which we are reviewing are the USR5450 a/p and the USR8054
wireless router.

  We already have a perfectly fine LinkSys BEFSX41 cable/DSL router in place
and configured to provide DHCP, NAT and other network router services.  Our
project is to add wireless access to the network at a much better located
single ethernet connection point than is the WAN / LAN daisy-chain ethernet
connection where the wireless router must be stationed to perform its
customary routing/WAN access tasks.  And, to provide this service at the
unexpectedly reduced expense.  Gosh, better service, less expense:  that's
an arithmetice that sounds familiar.

Tommy Holmes, Jr.
[log in to unmask]
713.621.5666



> -----Original Message-----
> From: PCBUILD - Personal Computer Hardware discussion List
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of David Gillett
> Sent: Friday, October 17, 2003 10:57 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [PCBUILD]Wireless network access
>
>   I don't think this addresses Tommy's question.  It's pretty
> clear that the
> router adds functions not found in the access point.  It's not
> clear whether
> the access point offers features not in the router.  (Hey, Tommy,
> could you
> give us some model numbers so we know exactly which units you're looking
> at?)  And yet the router is less than half the price of the
> access point, at
> the moment.
>
>   [WINS is actually the mechanism for offering NetBIOS name resolution
> across multiple subnets.  Many routers provide a way to forward DHCP
> requests to a server on another subnet, but it's usually simpler to equip
> each subnet with its own DHCP server -- and many routers can do that, too.
>   ARP is used to resolve layer 3 addresses to layer 2 addresses.  Since
> layer 2 traffic is, by definition, only within the local subnet, there's
> never a time when you'd need or want to propagate it to other networks.]
>
> David Gillett
>
>                             < snip >

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