A painting of me

We're Wireless Baby

   13 July 2004, evening time

I went out and bought myself a wireless router today. A Linksys Wireless-G Broadband Router to be exact. My computer only has a 802.11b card, but I thought I may as well get the faster router just incase Ahilan decides to get a wireless card.

I am curious if people have answers to the following questions I have:

  • I am pretty sure there are all sorts of third party firmware upgrades for the router made by linux-nuts. Anyone know where I can find stuff like that? And anyone use any thing like that?
  • Is there any way to use WPA with an Apple Airport card. I think you need an Apple Airport Express card to use WPA, but I was wondering if there is someway to use the better standard with the old Airport cards. Update: The old cards do work with WPA if they are running version 3.3+ of the airport software. You need to set your router to use WPA first. Once you do this, the option to enter a WPA password, will show up when you try to connect to the router.

I am currently using WPA to secure the network, not broadcasting the SSID of the router, and limiting access to my MAC address only. Normally I wouldn’t be so paranoid (well maybe that’s a lie) but our net connection at home already sucks ass without my neighbours mooching it. That old couple next door look a bit too techno-savvy for my liking.

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Comments

  1. I have a friend in Michigan who drives down streets seeing if he gets a connection on his powerbook, and most of the time he’s pretty successful.

    Funny, though, I don’t think he pays for his internet access anymore since his neighbors got wireless.

  2. yay for wireless! : )

  3. Shima was doing the same thing in her dormitory for a few weeks before all the wireless points smartened up and locked down. Apparently one of the dudes she is sharing internet with now legitimately was stealing internet for a whole school term last time he was in school. Wireless is great!

  4. Don’t you remember 487? WEP is a disaster. ;-) The link to the paper were suppose to read when I took it is still there.

    I’m going to go shopping to get my parents hooked up with wireless soon. I’ll probably bug you about technical stuff later too. :-)

  5. can we get the facts straight?! I was only borrowing their internet connection until i got mine set up. :P

  6. I’m well aware of the problems with WEP. However, I honestly don’t think someone in my neighbourhood is going to go to the effort of breaking my WEP encryption.

  7. another good example of security through obscurity

  8. I’m glad there are people out there that are smart enough to protect their wireless network. In my apartment and my ladyfriend’s house I can pick up wireless signals. Sure beats a modem.

  9. You don’t really need to be smart to crack WEP. You just need to be a script kiddie. :-)

  10. i’m not sure why i pay for internet at my place in waterloo, cuz unit13 (according to the ssid) also has wireless that i can connect to… hmmm…. i wonder if they have a faster connection than me…

  11. Oh, great … I recently set up an Airport Express network, so family members can connect to the internet and my printer. That’s good. Only problem is, my iMac doesn’t have an AirPort card in it yet, so I can’t configure and secure the network.

    But we live in the suburbs of Adelaide … surely none of our neighbours are techno-savvy enough to be wireless? Right? o_O

    Furthermore, I made the mistake of telling my brother he could use MarioKart Online Play with his DS. Now, how much internet quota has he wasted …

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