Dual PCMCIA cards
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Do you think this setup would work? I want to use an older laptop but it only has 1 USB port and 2 PCMCIA slots so I would need the PCMCIA 10/100 cards with the dongle to work.
Has anyone ever used this sort of setup?
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I wanted to this on my IBM Thinkpad 600X (PIII 450), which has dual PCMCIA slots. After all, it'd be pretty neat to run it off a small (and otherwise useless) laptop.
Stupidly, I didn't even try to run pfSense/m0n0wall on it before I bought an additional of the 3Com Megahertz 10/100 3CCFE574BT card I already had, as everything I had thrown at it before worked fine and dandy. Anyhow, I tried it with m0n0wall (which pfsense is based on), which couldn't even recognize the cards.
From what I gathered when I was the most into this, it's kind of hard to find any good PCMCIA (16-bit at least) cards to use with m0n0/pfSense. The cards I got are stated as 10/100Mbit, but I have never achieved more than 10 Mbit thru www.bredbandskollen.se (swedish broadband testing site) altho I got 100Mbit line and otherwise get around 92 Mbit.
I think you'd need 32bit PC CARD slots on your laptop to get any decent performance, but of course, if you find a cheap, compatible 16bit card and don't have demands for more than 10Mbit, it could work out OK. Just don't buy any 3Com 3CCFE574BT cards..
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thanks for the feedback.
Our service over in Canada is much slower (around 4-5 Mbits on average for DSL and Cable) so running slow broadband speeds is not much of an issue for me, I am just happy if it works.
I found a xircom 10/1000 dongle PCMCIA and I bought a 3Com 10/100 card today for cheap so hopefully it works out.