# A cure for all WiFi problems. Ever!



## kpedersen (Nov 10, 2013)

Hi all,

I have been evaluating the following bit of hardware to enable WiFi for an AIX box I bought off eBay a few weeks back: http://www.maplin.co.uk/pqi-air-pen-express-wireless-router-access-point-813892

Basically it is a tiny driverless USB powered router that you can connect to via an ethernet cable (you can't see the port in the picture) and use the web based interface to get it to connect to WiFi access points. This means that the machine does not need WiFi drivers of its own (which is great since AIX does not support WiFi).

It is about the size of a USB stick and for about Â£20 (~$32) it is also cheaper than many other WiFi dongles. It supports up to WPA2 Personal encryption too. It does typical router stuff, has an inbuilt firewall, acts as an access point as well as the "ethernet converter" functionality that I am using.

I am really happy with it and I highly recommend it for people who are worried about WiFi issues. I am also thinking about getting another one for my Thinkpad since the internal WiFi card gets quite warm. This would be great for Solaris 10, Windows 95, OS/2 and RISCOS too 

Edit: Looking at the interface names, I think the device itself is running some kind of Linux.

Screenshot of web interface: http://devio.us/~kpedersen/tmp/airpen.png


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