[Nottingham] wifi extenders and slow emails

[Martin]

Fay,

Very good suggestion and the sort of route I would go if ethernet cables 
are not practical. However, for reliability, ethernet cables are much 
preferred!


Nigel,

I also have little faith in the security of WiFi devices... Hence always 
assume that WiFi is not secure. OK, so the WPA2 encryption helps, but 
that will no doubt get compromised due to the compromises required for 
keeping WiFi devices low power and low cost and unmaintained...

Hence, stay with ethernet cable if possible.

Or for a commercial extender, go for whatever there is that is 'recent'.

Or optimally, put your own 'extender' together with a RasPi and know for 
yourself that the software is the latest and that it is kept securely 
up-to-date.


Aside: Another alternative that is possible, with caution, is to try 
mains cable networking devices. My experience has been that they can 
work well but are not completely reliable.


Another alternative is for whether you can place your modem-router box 
somewhere better, and especially away from any other electrical devices?

Note that TVs especially are electrically noisy and will 'deafen' a 
nearby WiFi device...


Just a further thought:

How do you know /where/ the slowdown is for seeing your emails?

Is your internet connection itself slow?
Or is it a slow webmail interface?
Or is the 'cloud' that your provider is using slow?

Myself, I've always found web browser based 'webmail' to be too slow and 
cumbersome and so have always used either Thunderbird or Mutt or K9 
clients to access email via "imap".


Good luck!
Martin


On 24/02/2021 21:12, Fay Knight via Nottingham wrote:
> As it happens I've just been mucking around with this on an old pi zero 
> w. I assume something very similar could be done with a full size pi 
> board to make use of Ethernet.
> 
> Don't know if it meets the requirement of being simple to set up, but at 
> least it has the advantage of being updatable once it is up and running.
> 
> https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-wifi-extender/ 
> <https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-wifi-extender/>
> 
> 
> Hope everyone's OK,
> 
> Fay
> 
> 
> On 24 February 2021 16:30:01 GMT, Martin via Nottingham 
> <nottingham at mailman.lug.org.uk> wrote:
> 
>     Folks,
> 
>     Forwarded from Nigel:
> 
>     Any insights?
> 
>     Cheers,
>     Martin
> 
> 
>     #####
>     Can anyone recommend a wifi extender that is reliable, secure, easy to
>     set up and inexpensive?
> 
>     I've been using a [WiFi extender] but have recently read that there are
>     potential security problems with some