[sf-lug] WIFI set-up

[Daniel Gimpelevich]

On Sun, 2016-04-17 at 11:21 -0700, Bobbie Sellers wrote:
>      Was looking at something else and found this.
> A project to build a router.  Maybe it could be made portable?
> By portable i mean small and light running from battery via
> the computer USB or on its own.
> 
>      bliss
> <http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/04/the-ars-guide-to-building-a-linux-router-from-scratch/>

Notice that the hardware in the article is not equipped with Wi-Fi of
any kind. Trying to run it from a battery for your purposes is a classic
example of "solving the wrong problem."

The hardware in the article, of the Ivy Bridge generation, has since
been discontinued and replaced with a Haswell model. For those wanting
the network performance the article series claims, this sounds like an
improvement, right? Wrong. The Ivy Bridge model had dual e1000 NIC's,
but the Haswell one replaced those with Realtek. So, you can't even
duplicate what the author did anymore.

Public Wi-Fi is slow, so you have no need of performance anyway.
Multiple devices exist for under $30 with much slower processors that
could do the job in the way you thought, many already battery-operated
or powered from USB, and devices like that may support OpenWrt, BUT:

Back to "solving the wrong problem," if you instead have one of those
Ivy Bridge or Haswell boxes sitting at home connected to the Internet,
or better yet something that uses less electric power, all you gotta do
is SSH into it from anywhere with the -w option, which effectively
creates a VPN to your home LAN.