WRE54G as an Access Point?
When my son had a Nintendo DS–he lost it someplace he shouldn’t have had it in the first place–he kept bugging me about how he couldn’t get on the WiFi (or as he calls it Wee-fee). That’s because I’m a paranoid SOB and only run WPA on my access points. The DS doesn’t support WPA, only the much weaker WEP protocol.
Meanwhile, I’ve recently swapped out wireless cards in the kids computers for a Linksys WRT54G running DD-WRT to add to my WiFi mesh. The wireless cards were not coming up on boot and required a bit of manual fiddling to get the computers online. Now they just plug in via Ethernet into the router and the router handles the WiFi part of it. Much more reliable, it seems.
However, the WRE54G I was also using as part of this WDS mesh seemed to “disappear” after deplying that WRT54G. I thought: hey, maybe I could use this WRE54G as an access point of sorts.
I dug up my PCI to PC-card adapter and stuffed it into a Linux server I keep running. I slapped in an old Orinoco WiFi card in it, configured a DHCP server on it, associated it with the WRE54G. Instant access point.
The access point is wide open–i.e. no encryption, but does not go to the Internet. It certainly could, but I’m not allowing it for the moment. If my son thinks I’m going to allow him to touch the Internet from a handheld device without direct supervision, he’s out of his mind. By keeping it from connecting to the Internet, him and his friends should be able to use their DS to play against each other. Well, as soon as he earns enough money to replace his DS anyway. 
