SmallNetBuilder

The Product, Continued

The two Site Survey screens, for example, could easily have been merged into one and would be more useful that way. Note that Figure 5 doesn't show the Channel and Privacy columns, the latter of which required me to fiddle with all the other column widths in order to expose it entirely. Note also that Privacy shows only "Enabled" when either WEP or WPA is in use.

Figure 4: Site Survey (click to enlarge)

Figure 5: Site Survey - Opened Site (click to enlarge)

Sharp-eyed readers may also notice that the Signal and Noise columns in Figure 5 are swapped, which flips the sign on the SNR reading from positive to negative. My last gripe about these screens is that neither let you just tap on an entry to connect to it. Instead, you have to visit the Configure Wireless Networks screen (Figure 6), which at least is conveniently linked from the Status page, although not from Site Survey.

Figure 6: Configure Wireless Networks
(click to enlarge)

The More Info screen (Figure 8) - available via the Network Troubleshooting screen (Figure 7) has all your IP address info and even provides a peek at the IP forwarding table, which only real networking geeks (or Network Admins) will appreciate. The Network Troubleshooting screen itself contains a Repair button (which really only does a DHCP Release / Renew) and a Contact button, which lets you ping an entered IP address. Figure 7 shows a ping in progress, with the Contact button changed to Stop.

Figure 7: Network Troubleshooting (click to enlarge)

Figure 8: Network Troubleshooting - More Info (click to enlarge)

The last two screens I'll cover are Authentication (Figure 9) and Advanced Wireless (Figure 10). The WCF54G supports WEP128 encryption and 802.1x authentication (TLS and PEAP), but doesn't include WPA. (I asked Linksys whether WPA support would be added and received a "not in the near future" response.) Tweaks that you can make via the Advanced Wireless screen are pretty much self-explanatory from looking at Figure 10.

Figure 9: Authentication (click to enlarge)

Figure 10: Advanced Wireless (click to enlarge)