I'm not sure why people think wireless is a panacea. It's not. It's a technology in it's infancy.
I run wireless in my home because I don't own the walls (I'm renting). I also run wireless at my work location and at my girlfriends work location. So I have some small experience with this. We use the wireless so we can walk around with our laptops. Up until Windows XP SP2, wireless was a zoo. with SP2 it's a bit better. We were able to use our laptops this weekend at my cousin's house in Chicago, using her wireless. Only took 15 minutes or so to configure - that was easy. Not. Wireless at this point is a soup of conflicting non-standards. In another thread, a person reported that, travelling for business to wireless hotspots at hotels, every day was a different adventure, no two connections worked the same, sometimes they just plain didn't work at all. Anyone who tries to make this Slim's fault is making about as much sense as blaming his Firestones for the potholes in the road. Wireless is still very bleeding edge. There are 4 access points in my range this week. Last week there were only 3. Last week 2 were unencryped. This week the 2 wised up and are encrypted. I already had to move my channel once because someone showed up who was bigger and stronger than me and overwealmed my connection - to the bedroom through 2 walls and maybe 20 feet. Someone else in another apartment, perhaps 100 feet away, is overpowering my 20 foot connection. Think about that. I live near a community college. New students move in and out of the area weekly. Next week I may have no wireless at all, because the guy next door or across the street put in something on the same channel with me. In this "soup", I operate a wireless SB1. Small buffer, less tolerant of interference before dropping out. It works like a charm. For now. If I had a choice, I would have hard-wired it. I'm about to put it on a home-plug network to get away from the potential interference problems. I tried this out before at my girlfriend's work, and now I'm installing it at home. I have the units, just haven't found the time to install them yet. I share a transformer with *way* fewer people than I share air for 200 feet in each direction. Conclusion: wireless is still an immature technology. If computer and technology stores were responsible, they'd post a sign over the wireless section "Here lie dragons". But of course they're not. Instead, they have 50 different and mutually incompatable systems from 20 different manufacturers, all fighting for your dollar and all not telling you they worked hard at ripping the standards to shreds for a miniscule, furtive marketting advantage, letting your interoperability and connectivity suffer as a result. Now for some recommendations. These are posting in innumerable threads on this forum, and are not due to me nor can I take any credit. 1. Turn off all forms of non-standard accelleration. These are variously called "Boost", "Turbo" or "108". There may be other names. Basically anything that claims speeds over 54MHz is non-standard, since the standard (802.11G) only defines operating modes up to 54MHz. It is supposed to be possible with these things for the SB to negotiate full-standard operation, but some of the recent revisions of the firmware are to try to guess how to make the non-standard units work according to standards and the manufacturers aren't letting on. 2. Turn off all attempts to splice or join adjacent channels. This is the same nonsense. 3. 802.11N, also sometimes called MIMO, is different and likely can be left on. MIMO is an antenna protocol - in an array of several antennas, the back ones are used as reflectors for the front one, and the arrangement switches with each client, so effectively you get a directional antenna which switches directions to the one it remembers as being the right direction for each client. Lord knows what they do if you walk around the room with your laptop, but since Slims aren't really wireless, they're only one-wire-less, they probably aren't moving around the room dynamically. But you need to be careful. 802.11N is not a finished standard yet, and the routers out so far are properly pre-n routers, because they encapsulate a standard that has not been finalized yet and might change in some implementation details after you buy the router. 4. Use the router list in the wiki. The router list is anecdotal - it's who had which problem with which firmware level. Your milage may vary. If it does, contribute to the page. 5. Switch to using encryption protocols once you have the basic wireless working with your slim (and not before - the risk is slight if you operate for half an hour without encryption, and the risk is far greater that you won't get it working properly if you turn encryption on from the beginning). 6. Use the best encryption you can. WEP is weaker than WPA, but WPA is not supported by 802.11b devices, so not supported with SB1s, for example. SB2s and 3s suppport 802.11g, so support WPA. But some WAPS and routers don't - check the list. 7. Don't bother with hiding your SSID. It makes it harder for the Slim to find the WAP initially, and offers essentially no additional security. Anyone with a copy of netstumbler (don't have it - get it. It's an education) can find out your SSID anyways. Mark pointed out in another thread that turning off SSID advertising only removes one of 5 packet types that display your SSID to the world. 8. Consider MAC address filtering. It's not perfect, because anyone with a little programming skill (or a program) can put a wireless card into promiscuous mode, watch your packets go by, find out your MAC address, and then forge packets as coming from your address. But it'll keep out the riff-raff. For a while. 9. Unless you build a separate network for your Slims alone, there's more than music flowing out that wireless connection. If you are sharing printers, or networked disks, anyone who can see and forge your packets can see and rewrite your data, print on your printer, etc. Did I mention that you should turn on encryption? 10. Published reports say WEP encryption is crackable. I don't know how much power that needs, but what used to take a Cray can now be done on a laptop. If you were a determined hacker, you could stuff the back of a station wagon or a van with enough modern dual-processor boxes and memory networked together and running off the car ignition networked to a laptop with a wireless card and rival what took a roomfull of supercomputers ten years ago. It's unlikely that someone would muster that much power to break into your network or mine, because we (well, I anyways) am not that high profile, so anonymity is our biggest asset. But that's not to say it can't happen. 11. WPA is less crackable, but I don't know if it's been proven theoretically that it can't be cracked. 12. Use strong passwords. If it's your neighbour trying to get in, or the kid down the block, he already knows your wife's name and the name of the dog. Be more creative. A lot more. Most password schemes slow down to a crawl after a few wrong guesses, to time penalize password guessers and make bulk password guessing impossibly slow and unprofitable. The password schemes in WAPs mostly can't do this. At best, they could shut down the entire WAP in the face of a password guesser (but I doubt they do). 13. If you also have mac filtering turned on, the password guesser would have to be using the same (or a small number of) MACs for each guess, and then the WAP could time penalize all traffic from the MAC doing the guessing, consequentially penalizing the true hardware with that MAC, but more effectively repelling the attack. This is theoretical. I have no idea if they really do this, but they could. Personally, I doubt they do. 14. Are you really sure you want to be doing this? It's not quite like leaving the keys to the car in the car - it's more like leaving the keys to the car hanging on a peg in the kitchen, and leaving the front door open. Still not a great idea if you have another choice. Finally, some comments to the OP. 1. How is this Slim's fault? They didn't create the swamp, they just gave you the option of running your product in the swamp. 2. Slim has had a dozen firmware releases to try to deal with these issues. In the same time the router you use has had one firmware release. This shows that the router people have lousy customer service and Slim has better service. Slim clearly doesn't have the problem licked yet, but they are persuing it aggresively, unlike other vendors. The major router vendors, if you check out forums about their products, fix things 6 months to a year after a complaint. Slim hustles a fix out in days. This reflects well on Slim. Shame on the router vendors. They created the swamp and are slow to drain it. 3. If you think Sonos (or any one manufacturer) can fix the swamp, more power to you. Good luck with that. Nothing will fix the swamp until consumers stop buying non-standard hardware and the incentive for the vendors to manufacture smoke and mirrors goes away. In the mean time, cat 5 or 6 copper fixes the swamp. The best strategy for negotiating the swamp is to go around it. -- Michaelwagner ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Michaelwagner's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=428 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=23134 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
