Subject: Re: IETF Wireless

From: Stuart Cheshire <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 May 2000 15:57:26 -0700

I'm getting a flood of individual questions here, so I'll stem the flow 
by answering them publicly:

>That would be great. Will they sell them at a discount to the rest of us?

The current retail price of $300 is already a "discount" price. For that 
price you get 11Mb/s wireless, 10Mb/s Ethernet with DHCP client, a 56k 
modem with PPP, DHCP server on both wired and wireless interfaces, DNS 
relay, Ethernet-level bridging, IP-level routing, WEP encryption, nice 
configuration software (that runs on a Mac) and even (ugh!) a NAT 
gateway. I'll let you speculate about how much profit Apple makes on each 
unit.

For details, see <http://www.apple.com/airport/>.

One word of warning, before you rush out and buy one: Understand that 
Apple makes this product in order to sell more Macs (all Macs, desktop 
and laptop, come with dual antennas moulded into the plastics and a slot 
for the $99 add-on card). If, after you buy a base station, you call the 
Apple support line and start your question with, "I have this Intel 
laptop running Linux...", then they are unlikely to give you much 
sympathy. If this is a problem for you, you should avoid buying a 
wireless base station from Apple. Many other vendors, including Lucent, 
sell them too.

Bill Fenner has a page of unofficial information about the Apple wireless 
base station:
<http://www.aciri.org/fenner/airport/airport.html>

My reason for offering these to the IETF is to help the IETF, and within 
reason I will do as much as I can to help the IETF use them, including 
sitting there with my Mac laptop to configure them if necessary, but 
Apple does not extend that offer in general to every PC owner.

>the "gold" level of encryption may be important to lots of people, but as 
>far as I know, the AirPort basestations only support the weaker crypto.

AirPort base stations are fully 100% compatible with end-to-end IPSEC :-)

Besides, if you tell 3000 people at an IETF meeting the single shared 
network key, it hardly matters how many bits are in it -- it's simply not 
a secret any more.

AirPort uses the Lucent Silver card, which Lucent calls "64-bit RC4", 
even though 24 of the bits are a fixed "seed" value. Apple calls this 
"40-bit RC4", which is a little more honest.

>- It has no way to add extenal antennas to boost signal.

Not true. I know people who've drilled a little hole in the case and 
attached an external Lucent antenna to the card inside.

>Stuart, if I recall, the beacons (base stations) can't be
>configured without an Apple laptop running an appropriate
>version of the software and operating system.  Has that changed?
>If not, I have no idea whether we have such machines available
>or how we would find or scrounge one (and presumably a second as
>backup) to make the donation viable (the Lucent bridges that
>have been most often used of late can be configured from any of
>Win NT, Win95/98, or some U**x flavors).

There are unsupported tools to configure AirPorts from Windows, and I've 
even heard that there's a Java version too.

However, I'd recommend just setting them all to simple Ethernet-level 
bridging, and disabling all the other features, and then you don't ever 
need to reconfigure them again. I have several PC-owning friends who use 
AirPorts like this.

>Is there a way to turn off the NAT in the AirPort access points?  We've
>had trouble here with PCs using them because the NAT implementation
>doesn't handle NETBIOS.  Also, given the general dislike of many people
>in the IETF for NAT, it may not be something that the IETF wants to use
>itself.

Ha! Made me laugh.

Do you seriously think I'd let Apple ship a product that forced you to 
use NAT? Be serious!

Stuart Cheshire <[email-masked]>
 * Wizard Without Portfolio, Apple Computer