Liquid and computer equipment do not mix. I have found this to be true.
Yesterday I was eating cornflakes for breakfast when my phone rang. I ran to pick up the phone and some milk fell on my Linksys wireless ethernet bridge (WET54G). Of course this killed it.
As you can see, WET is not the appropriate model number for it. But that is another story.
I use the bridge to connect my home LAN to my Linksys wireless router. The bridge has an ethernet card on one side and a wireless card on the other.
Essentially my LAN was cut off from the internet. This made me very depressed. I had no internet access and replacing the bridge would be expensive. Worse, they are hard to find.
Fortunately I remembered reading that Pfsense had drivers for wireless cards. Last night I installed a wireless card and loaded Pfsense on the Smoothwall machine. This morning I now have internet access for my LAN again. No need to purchase a wireless bridge.
You just have to love open source software. I will need to get a different wireless card, however. This one will not connect to the Linksys router when I enable WPA2. So I have temporarily disabled security on my wireless LAN to check my mail and post this. This has to be fixed soon.
Pfsense 1.2.3 is based on an older version of FreeBSD so it supports a limited range of wireless cards. Version 2.0 is to be released soon so hopefully we will see a greater level of support.
So my network is a bit simpler today. Yesterday I have a Linksys router, a Linksys bridge, Smoothwall and the LAN's ethernet switch. Today I have a Linksys router, Pfsense and the LAN's ethernet switch.