[Nottingham] Wireless routers

[Robert Hart]

On Fri, 2005-10-21 at 13:21 +0100, Ashley wrote:
> I am looking for advice and recomendations regarding wireless routers.
>  It is to be installed in an old three story house (solid walls) and
> needs to be powerful enough to reach all rooms.  I have never used a
> wireless network before.

erm. None of the wireless routers I've used could (reliably) do that out
of the box, but it depends a bit on the clients you are using. Laptop
wireless cards seem to have worse antenna than desktops with external
aerials IMHO.

> I am a rather concerned about security.  What security features should
> I look for?
> 
> What is the best wireless secuity setup that can be used with XP home?
> (not my choice!!!)

As far as I know, all new routers (and wireless cards) support a range
of different standards, all you have to do is turn it on! It's not 100%
foolproof but it should be more than sufficient for home use.

With XP, when you install the network card, you may or may not get a
utility program installed from the manufacturer that bypass the native
Windows control panel. This seems to be cause of most of the
problems/confusion when setting up wireless security on windows.

> Can I block access to all but specified mac addresses?

You could, but in many cards the MAC address is reprogrammable so it's
not hard to spoof.

-- 
Robert Hart <enxrah at nottingham.ac.uk>
University of Nottingham


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