AirPort Bandwidth Leeching

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I have my house set up with AirPort 2. This computer (G4) has the card in it, and the other computer (G3) is connected via LAN. Well, our cable went out, so I was stuck with no internet. I then looked at the AirPort status menu and saw a network called "linksys." I had never seen this before and I didn't make it, so I decided to jump on. It turns out, my nextdoor neighbor has DSL and uses a linksys wireless router. He's not much of a computer guy, so it was open and WEP free! The signal is about 1/2 strength, but it works! Thank god for wireless internet!
 
My folks have a Linksys wireless router thing at their place, so when I go there I bring my iBook and can still do my homework and stuff. Not to mention my school's campus is like one big wireless network that I can connect to. Good stuff.
 
I have been looking into getting an Airport card for my G4 desktop, but had few questions on how well it worked. From everywhere I read, I am told that if I buy an Airport Base Station that it will allow any computer with an IEEE 802.11b compatible card connect to it and be able to access the internet. I am told that it does not matter if the computer is a Mac, PC, or Linux box. All it has to have is an IEEE 802.11b wireless card and you can share an internet connection and surf the web on any computer after connecting to the base station. I have also read that if you buy the $99 for you desktop Mac you can turn your desktop Mac essentially into a base station by enabling a software base station option. I would like to know if this is true and how well it works from someone who has tried it out. My true concern is that the software base station via my G4 desktop won't work as well as a true base station and that it will not allow non-Mac systems to share connections with it unlike the true hardware base station. Just would like to clarify things before I go spend the $99 and find out it won't do what I want it to do. Let me know what you guys have found to work and be true.

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RHITMacMan
 
It is true that any computer equipped with an 802.11b card can connect to your network. However, you have the option of encrypting the network, making it a closed network, or both. The encryption makes it so that only people with the password for the network can get on it. A closed network doesn't show up on the list of available networks. The only way to get on it is if you know the exact name of it. If you have the 802.11b card in your computer, you can connect to any wireless network that uses 802.11b, no matter what it's running from. It is also true that you can use the $99 AirPort card in you G4 as a software base station, but only under OS 9. I've not yet used the software base station, but I'm told by others that it works just fine. I've had my AirPort for 20 days now and I must say I've had no problems with it. It was the perfect solution for us because of where the walls are in our house. Since the computers are in odd places, we wern't able to run cables. It also allows us to use the internet from our laptops anywhere inside (and some places outside) the house.
 
If I have to use OS 9 to use the software base station option then the $99 card is probably not worth my time. I rarely use MacOS 9 anymore and I am surely not going to run it all the time now just to enable internet connection sharing via the wireless card. I use OS X for serving webpages and doing web development projects, which is far superior in OS X with Apache compared to OS 9. Now if the new version of Airport, version 2.0 for MacOS X re-enables the software base station mode under OS X this would be great. Then I would definitely be getting the card since this is all I really want it for. Anyone know if this is the case?

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RHITMacMan
 
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