Wireless Networks

nasty_crash

Hey guys

Im thinking of setting up a wireless network. Ive 8 pc's and im gonna get dsl in when i upgrade my network.

What equipment would ye advise to get and is it much different from settin up a normal LAN

Cheers

Nasty

irishguy

if you could at all i would recomend you setting up a wired LAN as it would be ALOT cheaper

longword

Wired networks aren't nearly as much fun though!

Think about going part wired, part wireless. Maybe get a cheap access point from Linksys or D-Link and one or two USB 802.11b widgets. You can get PCI wireless cards, but USB are handy and you get to position it for best reception. It's always going to be much slower than a wired network for big file transfers, but the lack of cables is a definite winner.

There's not much to the setup, especially if you ignore WEP for the first day or two. The access point will work as a bridge to whatever wired network you've got, and most will act as a DHCP server if you ask nice. On the client side you tell the PC to connect to whatever wireless net they can see - they'll pick up on the access point automatically.

DannyD

check out the forum on irishwan.org

glimmerman

i have a few pcs at home, networked with wired and wireless..... theres not a hell of a lot of config to it. I have a small pc which does the routing/firewalling/natting , one eth interface into a 4 port hub, and the other connected to an lacatel speedtouch dsl modem. if you have a bit of networking exeperince this is pretty much a doddle to setup, using pppoe under linux. on the other hand, I also have an access point (cisco aironet 350) hooked into the hub as well, which is setup for not serving dhcp (I only have 1 wireless device), and since I've just set it up, its not running wep either (for some bizarre reason, when I tried configuring wep this afternoon the wireless network ground to a halt). its was easy enough to setup, all you really need to know is what the SSID of the network is (kind of a domain name for a radio network I guess). And I also got a progear tablet pc with linux up and running with this on friday :) woohoo, surfing pr0n from the couch :)

give wireless a try... you *know* you want to :)

Rew

Im curious, is WEP the only security that wireless users are employing?? Its a grand defance against a casual passer by, but pretty useless after that...

glimmerman

well, I guess there are others too: for one, my access point offers filtering on mac addresses too, and i guess if I really wanted to, I could go with something like ipsec for encryption too. not sure how that would work with my current setup, it would probably require ipsec setup on a wireless gateway to which the AP was attached to. But I think wireless could be made secure without WEP too.

Rew

MAC filtering is easily defeated, and dosn't stop sniffing. Yeah IPSec VPN is the best way to go but are many people actually employing them?

Im surprised how many default SSID's and default passwords are in use on AP's as well.

There were a couple of intresting mails the the HostAP mailing list about detecting and and actively responding to the like os Airsnort and Netstumbler, it will be intresting to see what applications come out of it....