Folding Farm and Wireless Bridge

[WoodsBoy]

Wasn't exactly sure where to put this, but it's more about system advice than folding so here goes.

Going to assemble a small folding farm, but won't be able to put it inside my house (you guys can probably guess why) but I do have a shop out back. I don't want to run an ethernet cable out to the shop, getting it into the house to my router would be a real pain in the rear. I do have a wireless router inside that the kids' PCs connect to.

I was thinking about having the folders connected to a hub in the shop, then connect the hub to a wireless bridge. Like this one

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDe ... 026&depa=0

Here's the info from the Netgear website:

http://www.netgear.com/products/details/ME101.php

Would this work? Does anyone have any experience using a bridge like this?

Reading on the Netgear website, the folders shouldn't know the difference. The are connected with a wire to the hub and the hub is connected wirelessly to my router.

[MikeC]

No reason why not, if you follow standard network wiring & protocol. But my experience with wireless is that it is often finicky, far less trouble free than the ads / industry would like you to believe. Definitely worth a shot tho.

[Rusty075]

I would double check the distances involved. If your shop is a ways from the house you could run into trouble from that. Whatever Netgear lists as the range, I would try to not go more than a quarter to a half of that distance. The performance really drops with distance, and going through the insulated exterior walls of your house will really knock a chunk off the range.

(then again, for a F@H farm, performance really isn't critical, it doesn't matter whther it takes 15 seconds or 2 minutes to get the next WU)

[CoolGav]

I have done something like this with a D-link acess point. It was advertised as being able to bridge, and then the manual told me that was only with another AP exactly the same. Well, tinkering for a while made it work with my 3Com router, so I'm happy, and it works. The range I go is quite small (downstairs to upstairs), but through a concrete staircase. If you get a bridge then it ought to bridge with anything out of the box. As Rusty says, be careful about the range, but if you can sort that it will be fine...

[wooglin]

From what I've read about most of the low-cost bridge solutions, expect a hit in performance of anywhere from 25% to 50% of what your regular wireless connections currently have. But like Rusty said, it's only WUs