I installed a smc wireless card to my laptop and the same thing, i was up and running with no problem. The Wireless hub has good range and so far everything is perfect. I really recomend this product over Linksys, Dlink and netgear hands down. The price is decent and it's worth it. Trust me you gonna like it.

Here's a mini-review of my Barricade.

The pros:
Brain-dead simple to install

Nice list of features

Pretty good firmware support from the manuf.

Flexible setups for DSL, cable, and dial-up accounts

Very nice MAC address association/ connection support

Very good range and speeds (for me)... well over 4 Mbit/s all over my house and out in the yard

Fast and easy print driver setup (easier & better than DLink's)

The cons (for me):
Periodic drops of TCP/IP connection (no pings, no Internet... dead), requiring unit reboots or waiting for it to come back online

The unit would clearly not pass through the NetBEUI protocol to my wired clients, so I was stuck with no safe way to connect to other computers via Windows File and Printer sharing (you should never, never let your network adapters communicate through TCP/IP for this... unbind TCP/IP or you WILL be hacked!)

So, like I said, I sent it back. I could have tried my luck with another unit, but I went with the D-Link to check it out. With a functioning unit, it would be a toss-up for me which to choose... the Barricade has better printer support, the D-Link has slightly better Throughput and a cleaner Web-based interface.

Hope this helps,
Brian Brown

Concerns have not been valid. The barricade runs no hotter than my dsl modem. Distance is great. I live in a large old house with plaster/lathe walls. I walk greater than 50 feet with no trouble. I am upstairs now and my router is downstairs in back corner of house.
Couldn't be sweeter. I recommend these products.
P.S. Another plus of the barricade is that you get a printer port and 3 hard ports.

The iMac came with an Airport card pre-installed and has since been upgraded to Airport 2 in OS X. I also recently acquired a Lucent Technologies Orinoco (formerly Wavelan) Silver PC Card from Agere Systems, which offers 64-bit WEP for my Powerbook.

The most challenging aspect of setting up the WEP security is getting it to work on each hardware device. I'll explain the three steps it will take to get the above configurations working. We're still using Macs, so it's relatively painless once you know how. The steps below assumes you're familiar with the wireless aspects of your hardware and that you're not yet using or haven't figured out how to enable WEP using your SMC router.

Step 1 for the router: Access your SMC router via your web browser on any Mac using a hardwire Ethernet connection and click on the last link in the left pane, "Wireless". In the main window, under Wireless Setting, select a name for your wireless router in the space next to Network ID(SSID). The next item, Channel, can be left alone. The item after that is where you set your WEP Security. In my case, since the PC Card in my Powerbook uses 64-bit WEP encryption, I chose the "Enable IEEE 64 bit Shared Key security" option for the router. Now choose "WEP Key 1" and enter a Hexadecimal string of 10 characters (you can only use the numbers 0-9 and the letters a-f). I try to come up with a nifty pass phrase to help me remember the string, which may prove challenging using hex. In our example, let's use decade2010. Save your changes and reboot the router.

Step 2 for the iMac: In either OS 9 or X, invoke the Airport Setup Assistant. The assistant should detect your SMC wireless router now. In OS X, you'll get an Enter Network Password dialog box where you'll need to enter the hexadecimal string you came up with in Step 1. But in order for it to work, you have to enter a dollar sign ($) before the string. In our example, the network password that will work with your Apple branded Airport card and the SMC router is: $decade2010

Step 3 for the Powerbook: Open the ORiNOCO control panel and click on the Encryption tab. Click on the Enable Encryption check box and next to Key 1: enter a zero (0) and the letter "x" before the string in Step 1. This lets the Wavelan card know you'll be transmitting using a hexadecimal string. In our example, Key 1 will look like this: 0xdecade2010 (don't forget to set the "Transmit using" to use Key 1 and then click on Set to save your changes). If you click back to the Basic tab, you should see Closed Network for Network:, and your router's name for Net Name: which you set up in Step 1.

This setup works flawlessly for me and I highly recommend this non-Apple branded hardware.

The SMC wireless router has a printer server port and a serial port if you want to add your old 56K modem to it. This is good if you have broadband and it goes down. I've only tested this scenario and I pray to the Wireless Goddess that I never need to invoke it! It also bridges AppleTalk, which is awesome for printing to old laser printers that have Ethernet, but don't support TCP/IP and for easy file sharing. The USB Printer Sharing in OS 9 works great too.

The Lucent wireless PC Card is actually an Apple Airport card, but Lucent of course adds the antenna. This card is compatible with any Powerbook with a PCMCIA slot in it (even the 5300 and 190 series!) using Mac OS 7.5.2 and greater.

And best of all, SMC and Lucent support Mac users while many other non-Apple wireless hardware vendors do not.

Have fun in the wireless zone!

- Jarrod

1. Their technical support never returned my email question.
2. Their customer service returned my email question with an auto-reply message.
3. When I bought this product, it has a rebate. But see what I got: I received the rebate cheque just one day before the cheque is void! They were lucky as I couldn't go to a bank to cash in the cheque on the EXIPRY date.

All the above are TRUTH.

If you still want to buy this product, I can tell you as a matter of fact, I bought two of these. One for my home, and one for my company's branch office. The product is easy to setup and is still working.

The wireless connections are iron clad and it certainly helped me plug in my sony vaio to a broadband connection to play on the internet at 7 AM while the rest of the house slept. (of course they are students after all)

When I got back home I bouhgt the straight wireless SMC network (not this model its only the wireless networ) and I was bummed out because I had a lot of problems getting connections. I sold that sucker (...) and bought this little baby with the router and the print server.

Now I had no need for my network computer, we are all running Windows 2000, and from the moment that it was up and running I never looked back. BTW I called SMC tech support sveral times because of questions regarding the super security systems etc that this sytem has,and, i want to tell you that tech support was FABULOUS .... that in itself today is worth the price of the product ..

Lastly one incredible benefit of this sytem is that it has a true peer to peer network capablilties.... WOW ....

This is one of the geatest innovations for the small network user ever made ......

Although the 7004AWBR doesn't have a stateful firewall, it did seem to do quite well when some serious abuse was launched at it. And, this product integrates beautifully with a Cisco PIX 501 (which is a stateful firewall). Note that XP also comes with a stateful firewall built in.

Just remember that unless configured carefully, wireless access can provide an easy gateway for would-be hackers. At minimum use mac address control, and at best use IPSec/Kerberos also (the former is easy to do, and the latter is definitely more work).

I don't know that the competition is much better. I suspect to get a robustly build device that generates RF you may need to pay quite a bit more, perhaps on an Apple AirPort or a Cisco WAP.

For what it's worth the Barricade supported PC and Mac clients for about 18 months with good performance. Documentation in later versions of this device was much better.]

The multi-function device includes:

- router/firewall (NAT)
3 ports and a WAN port (in my case the "WAN" is really my existing fixed LAN, see below).

- a PC print server. Requires installing software on Win2K machines, OS X has some support. Setup in OS X is tricky. Search usenet for my postings on that.

- wireless access point (WAP)

This is a more complex device than the BreezeCom BreezeNet I used to have. The BreezeCom was a bridge, it didn't even have a network address. It acted like a hub and was transparent; I configured the wireless client just as I would a wired device on my LAN.

It would be better if the SMC device were firewall protecting my LAN from intrustion from an unauthorized wireless client (see 802.11b Security Issues), but as a device installed into my wired LAN it's "pointing" the wrong way. The SMC WAP is already working inside my LAN, so the firewall is "protecting" the wireless laptop against the machines on my regular LAN. In fact the real threat is unauthorized wireless client access to my wired LAN machines.

Physically it's unobtrusive, the antennae need to be oriented vertically. It comes with a large "power brick" transformer; I wish they'd charge $2.00 more and get a transformer that's easier to plug in to a crowded UPS.

Installation

I downloaded and installed the painless ROM upgrade. Router configuration is by web browser, there's no other access. For initial configuration I plugged one machine directly into the router and changed the network settings as per the manual. For some reason the DHCP function didn't work, but I didn't spend any time on it. I just gave my desktop machine an IP address of 192.168.123.100, subnet 255.255.255.0 and set the gateway to the router 198.168.123.254. Once I had upgraded the router and had control of it I changed it to have an "external" address of 10.0.0.200 so it would be visible on my LAN with a fixed address.

The cable from my existing hub connects into the WAN port, so my LAN is the "WAN" from the router's perspective and all my LAN machines are in a "DMZ".

I think I'll eventually put all my machines on the same size of the SMC firewall and rely on the 802.11b Security recommendations (for what they're worth). So then I'll have two firewalls, so I could put a machine between them (in a real DMZ) to act as a lightweight external server. For now the wireless client can access web servers in the wired LAN and it can get out to the net, but it cannot access Window services on the wired LAN.

For now the setup is:

Internet -> DSL/Cisco router (10.0.0.1) -> hub
--> 2 PCs, 1 old Macintosh (all 10.0.0.x)
--> SMC device -> 1 wireless client (192.168.123.x)

I'm also not too happy with the SMC tech support. I've asked questions over and over and never gotten a clear response.

On the plus side, it works fine for general use so you can check your email from the couch no prob. Range seems to be good but dunno how it compares to other products. Admin is easy. Firmare upgrades are waaaay easy. (compared to a linksys non-wireless router I had)

The SMC is a great solution for the casual user who just wants to be able to use their laptop in another room. Tech support may be better with general setup questions so if you don't get too crazy with it you'll be all set. I suppose it's a decent cheap alternative to the other base stations out there but I'm not too happy with it. If I were to buy a WAP again I would problee just spend the extra loot on the AirPort. You know you get quality with Apple, you know it will be supported, and you know if there is a problem it will be an easy fix.

This product installed like a dream - within 10 minutes, out of the box, up and running - no hassle, not even a software install. Most of the time was taken poking around under my desk for a spare power socket.

Absolutely excellent and I can't recommend it enough.