Hi,
I'm shopping for a PDA to use as a laptop replacement for short trips and meetings where I don't need the power of a laptop. The Sony Clie TH55 fits most of the bill. It has WiFi except most meeting rooms, hotel rooms, and business offices I visit don't have WiFi. But most places have a LAN and ethernet jack into which I have been plugging in my laptop.
Can I just plug a wifi router into the LAN and the PDA will have connection to the LAN and Internet? I'm assuming the RJ45 socket in the client's office is coming from a router elsewhere in the building, can I just daisy chain another router (this time a wifi one)? Anyone have any success with daisy chaining routers?
The wifi router I'm looking at is a netgear one that is relatively small and light, about the size of pocket book, so am willing to carry that around.
Seems I can daisy chain (connect) a wireless router to another router. (See netgear article). I would need to turn off DHCP addressing (so the 2nd router won't issue IP addresses). The second thing I need to do is assign the 2nd router an IP address outside the range used by the 1st router. Seems straight forward.
But sales people suggest I probably shouldn't stick a wireless access point on someone's LAN, behind their firewall. Good point. A work around is to use MAC addressing (assuming PDAs can do that) to limit the wireless router to communicate only with the one PDA. Still I'm sure the client's IT folks would have a bird.
You're absolutely right that IT would blow a gasket for you setting up a wireless router behind their firewall. But, there's a lot of things you could do to make it less open to others (might mollify the IT guy when you get caught, but he'll still be torqued) These include setting the router to not broadcast the SSID, making the SSID something unique and unguessable, using the strongest encrytion your card will support, and using MAC adressing on the router. I do all of these on my home router. MAC addressing is set on the router (not the handheld), by telling it to only allow a particular item to access.
Given that it's only temporary and short range access that you want, have you considered a Bluetooth to Ethernet router? I don't know what the security issues may be. If it's something worth pursueing, ask LisaG, she runs a BT access point.
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