Linksys WRT54G / WPC54G / IPAQ 5550

I have spent a day playing with the above and found the following
problems:

The IPAQ will talk to the WPC PCMCIA card (fitted in a Sony laptop)
but only of both are configured in ad-hoc mode.

The WPC will talk to the WRT router but only if the WPC is configured
to infrastructure mode. The router itself has no config for ad-hoc
mode.

The IPAQ will not talk to the WRT at all. (**)

We have tried it straight out of the box, with no encryption, with
64-bit WEP, 128-bit WEP and nothing makes much difference.

We can get the laptop entering the WRT config (IE6 opening
192.168.1.1) via the wifi port (the laptop has no ethernet port)

The best I managed was connecting another PC to one of the WRT's
ethernet ports (via a Linksys SD216 ethernet switch), opening IE6 on
192.168.1.1, and opening the WRT config on that PC, and also this PC
and the Sony laptop seeing each other via network neighbourhood.

But no luck with the IPAQ.

(**)Just once or twice in the whole day we got all 3 (WRT, WPC, IPAQ)
to appear together in the Linksys WPC config/diagnostic software but
that was it. It happened with the channel set to 10.

The whole wifi connection, even between the Linksys products, seems to
be pretty unreliable at the best of times.

I also tried a different approach which I have used at both home and
office with Cisco 803 routers for years: set the router's ethernet IP
to a fixed value, set each PC's IP to a fixed value, and on each PC
set the router's IP as the gateway IP. DHCP disabled on all devices.
This is a perfectly reasonable setup for an office where a number of
PCs access the internet via a router, and with the fixed IPs you
always know where you are. Has the WRT/WPC ever been tested with fixed
IPs ("use the following IP address" under TCP/IP Properties under
Networking in Control Panel)?

But it didn't help, though I did find something odd: if one changes
the WRT's IP to e.g. 10.105.100.254 one can access its config on that
IP OK (instead of on 192.168.1.1) but ONLY if DHCP is enabled on the
WRT. If you disable DHCP on the WRT you cannot enter its config at
all. (if DHCP is enabled on the router then the PC used for
configuring it cannot have a fixed IP)

I wonder if somebody has hard-coded the 192.168 ... IP in a few
places, and I wonder if the WRT router has ever been tested with DHCP
disabled.

These items have been recently bought but perhaps everything needs a
firmware upgrade???

Can anyone suggest anything?

 

I also wonder if a device like the IPAQ should ever actually work with
the WPC PCMCIA adapter... maybe it is limited to accessing a wifi
access point, so in effect its wifi function would in this case be
limited to accessing the internet through the WRT54G and the PC (via
the WPC54G) would never usefully connect to it??

I've been right through the CD PDF manuals and they contain no info on
any of this.


Peter.