.. wrote:

John Rumm wrote:


incompatibility of different vendors kit.


LOL

yah, you know /loads/ ;-)

The incompatibility is usually at a more subtle level than at the
MAC/LLC level. Andy touched on one of the most irritating examples in
his reply, and this is the issue of lame configuration software. Many
times you may have kit that talks at the physical level, but you are
unable to specify shared security settings to allow them to work, simply
because one configuration utility insists on a key being specified in
hex, and the other requires a textual key that it will then hash to form
a key. Needless to say they don't all use the same hash functions so
there is no ready way to convert one to the other.

Driver incompatibility is another problem. I lose count of the number of
times I have found WiFi NICs that in theory work over a number of OS
platforms only to find said compatibility is illusury when you actually
try to install them. With machine lockups or drivers that simply fail to
load at startup etc.

--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/