ORiNOCO's High-speed wireless access point for the Small and Medium Enterprise.
Contents
Overview
ORiNOCO's product page has your standard sales pitch.
Basically this is a little white box which contains a small pc-board with a PCMCIA adapter. The unit shipped with an Orinoco Gold card installed, and a poorly documented printed QuickStart guide, the real UsersGuides and supporting documentation are on the CDROM which containts OrinocoApManager software, OrinocoPcCard drivers and ClientSoftware.
The AP-500 only supports bridging mode, it is SNMP manageable through the bundled OrinocoApManager software, an HPOpenView module, or the Linux/Unix command line proxy provided by ORiNOCO/Lucent. Additional configuration programs could probably be made using SNMP. Its main difference with the AP-1000 is that it lacks the dual PCMCIA slots for providing possible wireless PTP links.
Notes and Comments
It turns out that the AP500 will alow you to use other rebranded Lucent/ORiNOCO 802.11b cards. I have a problem with Dell not provided updated firmware for their TrueMobile 1150 pcmcia card. I decided to try swaping the Dell card for the pre-installed ORiNOCO gold since the Dell is also a gold card supporting 128bit WEP. The unit functions fine with the Dell card, except with regards to the factory-reload mode. It seems that I could not get the unit to reset to its factory defaults with the Dell card installed. (I had munged the SNMP access list and couldn't access the device to configure it). Putting the ORiNOCO card back in remedied the problem, and I've since swapped it back out.
The under-clocked AMD processor of this beasty, is, I'm told, easy to overclock. Does anyone know how? Also, what are the advantages to this? More speed, obviously, but do I need it? How does the speed compare to factors such as heat and product life? Many thanks.
ONLY BRIDGE MODE ?
It really suprises me that while there are other APs out there that cost a heck ouf a lot less, that the Orinoco AP500 doesnt have a client mode. What gives? And the guides suck as well. Come on Orinoco, its time to get your act together.
== ==
Pictures
- Outside of the AP-500
- The "lid" of the AP is removable to access the internal antenna jack
- Guts with the PCMCIA card removed
- Avaya AP1
- Inside Avaya AP1 with PCMCIA card removed
- AMD chipset
AP-500 Links
NetworkWorldFusion article on the AP-500.
Note
The firmware of the RG1000, AP-500 and apple airport are interchangable. This site has a good section on such matters: http://wiki.personaltelco.net/index.cgi/ApFirmwareSwapping
Can anyone confirm the latest firmware release? The most recent one I have found is named ap05395.bin and can be read about here: http://www.proxim.com/support/software/ORiNOCO/AP/R7.5spring2002/ap_75.txt and downloaded here: http://vilos.com/rg1000/
Proxim said that they discontinued the rg1x00 do the lack of availability of the amd elan sc400. The AP-500 uses it though. Perhaps they have a bunch. The AP500 has itself been discontinued and replaced with the AP-600. If anyone has an AP-600 please post pics to the AP-600 page. It will be interesting if it has an sc-400 or the new sc-520.
External Products:
AP500 Password problem
If you cannot login to AP500 using default password do this:
1. Turn off AP500
2. Remove PCMCIA card from AP
3. Turn on AP500
4. Press Reload Button for one minute
5. Download and run AP Manager from http://www.proxim.com/support/software/ORiNOCO/AP/R7.5spring2002/WPAP75.exe
6. Select from Access Point Menu -> Upload Software
7. Upload firmware from http://vilos.com/rg1000/ap05395.bin
8. Wait 30 seconds until you see green power led
9. Turn off AP500
10. Install PCMCIA
11. Turn on AP500
12. Done 
