> Even when I had all 4 cards within 3 meter of each other, they formed
> 2 cliques.  Eg. computers A and B can only ping each other and
> computers C and D could only ping each other.  It wasn't till I did a
> few reboots that they all talked on the same net.  I *think* it was
> the ifconfig up/down that did the trick.

Hmm, how much is "a few"? I've powered down all systems multiple times and
they still don't talk. All worked well before I changed the nwid.

Are you using any kind of Windows on one of your machines? This may be an
incompatibility when passing the NWID to the firmware?

> I wonder what exactly is the nwid?  Is it a plaintext "password" that
> anyone can snoop from the airwaves?  Is it even worth setting this to
> something other than the default?

I thought this was the seed to the random number generator used to decide
which frequency to hop to next, but I can't remeber how I got that
impression. In fact I know nothing about how 802.11 works.


Martin