[ale] Putting wifi in the house

James Sumners james.sumners at gmail.com
Mon Jan 30 21:58:45 EST 2006


As has been said, use WPA if you can. I doubt your stand alone AP is
going to support it unless there is a newer firmware available to add
the support. It is relatively new. WPA support with you PCI card might
be easier but that is going to depend on what card it is and what
drivers you can use for it. I have an SMC 2802W for my
router/wap/gateway and it works rather well, but I don't know if it
supports WPA. The driver I am using is the old driver from
prism54.org.

But really, do you really need to "secure" the wireless signal? I
haven't seen any reason to attempt to do so. Anything sensitive I do
is already encrypted via ssh or ssl. I don't really care if people can
sniff my IM conversations and web surfing. If you are just worried
about the neighbors leeching bandwidth, why not let them? My AP is
wide open for anyone that wants to use it and I have never had a
problem. In fact, I don't think anyone other than me and my roommate
have ever connected to it. If someone else did start using it and
slowed down my network, then I would take steps to limit their access.

On 1/30/06, Jeff Hubbs <hbbs at comcast.net> wrote:
> The time has come for me to get WiFi instituted at home and I need to
> understand what *should* be done as opposed to *what people typically do*.
>
> I have a WiFi WAP that I bought on clearance about three years ago but
> have only fooled around with once, and I also have a PCI WiFi card that
> I bought around the same time that I haven't even used.  So, I could use
> either the WAP or I could theoretically make one out of any number of
> spare machines.
>
> What I would like to have happen is for our laptops to be able to "WiFi
> up" at home as easily as at Joe Blow's Hotspot and Cafe.  However, I
> also don't want to be trivially eavesdropped on or leeched off of (over
> the weekend, the newer laptop was finding two nearby WAPs from the
> living room and gave me the ESSID of one of them).  If those two
> concepts are not compatible, I need to know so that I can make the
> situation easily manageable.
>
>
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>


--
James Sumners
http://james.roomfullofmirrors.com/

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts
pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it
is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become
drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."

Missionaria Protectiva, Text QIV (decto)
CH:D 59



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