The title is a bit overdramatic, but I have just moved into a new office space and have been working frantically to resolve lots of small to medium problems.  Basically, the office is totally wireless. No ethernet or phone cables are strung anywhere, and I want everything to just work and  I bought a couple of new pieces of equipment to make that possible. 

Phones were the simple part.  Between cordless phones and wireless phone jacks, it's a snap to make all the phones talk to one another. The network was not as forgiving.  My general idea is to have one primary access point where the cable service comes in, and then put WDS-enabled access points in every office so that a person's computers can talk to one another over the wired connections, and route all outbound traffic through the main link.  That provides both a nice blanket network so that wireless is available throughout the office, while providing most of the niceties of wired connections.  I picked up some new hardware to make this possible, including a WRTSL54g, which is a fancier version of the standard WRT54g in that it has a USB port and so can have better storage capacity. I also picked up a new standard WRT54gl to act as WDS point. 

I had this system set up at home, but I used WEP to send the data over WDS, and I wanted to go to WPA for better security and ease of use (WPA2 may be my next project).  I also wanted everything to run the latest OpenWRT kernel, Kamikaze.  Of course, they went and changed all the WDS stuff since the previous version (White Russian) so I had to repuzzle out a lot of it.  I don't have the energy to link all the posts that I used to finally get it all working, but suffice to say, it took a lot longer than I had hoped, but I am currently writing this post sending my data out over a WPA encrypted WDS link, so I am feeling pretty good.  I really didn't want to walk into the office tomorrow still staring this same problem in the face.