"Wireless 108g Access Point"
To get info about the hardware and specs you should go here: http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Hardware/D-Link/DWL-2100AP
Modes available
There are 5 modes available:
- Access Point
No comment.
- WDS with AP
- WDS
It is not clear to me exactly how these work. That is, with 2 hours on the web and 2 hours sitting on the roof trying to configure these things, I was not able to get 2 identical 2100AP's running 2.10na software to do what I want (serve effectively as 2 ap's on the same network although only one of them is wired to the internet). Your results may vary. It is not at all clear to me what the difference between these two options are.
- AP repeater
This did NOT work for me to repeat a Belkin ADSL modem with lan or a linksys wrt54gx2, so I would not recommend buying this product if you want repeater functionality for anything but a DLink product. With another identical model, AP repeater works, but the connection, at 60 meters with some power lines in the way, has about 10% downtime (VERY unacceptable performance) using the provided antennas, even though when the connection is up the displayed signal strength is around 15-25%.
- AP Client
From limited experience and what I've seen on the web, this does work with DLink and other brands on the other side.
Security vulnerability
In firmware versions before 2.2, there is a "hidden" web page with ALL of the data (wep key, wpa key, passwords, etc.) just sitting there for anyone who knows the right address.
Hacking
On the web I've seen some interesting stuff about using telnet to increase the power output - overridetxpower (of course I know that increasing power on only one side of a connection is a waste of time, but I have 2 of these.) However, my firmware (2.10na) does NOT allow this nor does it let you reflash with an older firmware.
But on the link mentioned above, http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Hardware/D-Link/DWL-2100AP, there's some basic info about how to get it to boot another OS from tftp. The problem is then to boot an OS that will let you reflash. If you are a high-level hacker and have an image booting using TFTP but can't get the image burned to rom, there's some preliminary discussion on the openwrt forum about that that would interest you. The other way to accomplish this would be to figure out D-Link's obfuscated firmware format, .tfp. As I see it, encoding to this format would be great but decoding would be enough because you could just boot to an old enough version and reflash from there.
General feelings
The web interface to this is very flaky (over 10% of the time you get a half-baked page and have to reload, it makes you re-log-in irregularly but OFTEN, etc.). Also note the kindergarten security error mentioned above. Gives the feeling of an inferior product. Also, the dropped connections do not have me happy. But the range and data rate are good. Anyway, here in Guatemala, buying retail, it was my only choice for what I'm doing...
