Kbob wrote:
> The equipment roster:
>
> Laptop: Toshiba Portege 7000CT
> OS: Mandrake 7.0
> (God bless her, she didn't put BillOS on it.)
> Card: WaveLan/IEEE PCMCIA Gold 802.11
The cards are now called Orinoco. new name, same card.
> Access Point: 3Com AirConnect 802.11
I'm using the Apple Airports at work, which are cheaper to buy ($300) and
come with a silver card inside, which you can replace with a gold card if
you want stronger encryption. (the swap is trivial, a few screws and
clips and it's just a PCMCIA change of cards)
The Airport comes with MacOS software, but there is Windows, Java, and
perl (buggy) software also. Once you configure it, it's pretty easy. The
airport has both ethernet port and built in modem, so you can use it
pretty much anyway... it'll do DHCP or not, NAT or not, etc...
> So now we're thinking about setting up a wireless home network
> permanently. Has anybody done this? Recommendations? Warnings?
>
> Is there a good reason to get an access point? So far as I can tell,
> the advantages are that it comes with a good antenna and is easy to
> set up. The disadvantages are that there's no packet filtering, at
> least on the 3Com, and they're pricey. The network also
> operates in a different mode, peer-to-peer, but I don't really
> understand what that means.
If you put an antenna on a card and stick into your 'base' box (a
desktop), I don't think you'll need anything else... a good linux box can
do everything the Airport does and more. It's not shiny and cool, but for
$100+ for just a card and then $whatever for an antenna, I suspect that is
the cheap solution. Peer to Peer is so all of the cards can talk to each
other. No one central contact point (and all that implies). I suspect
you can make a damn good fake access point running Linux.
> We're in the middle of Silicon Valley,
I wondered why you never made our meetings in Eugene. (grin)
Thanks for being active on our list. :)
> so I think it's a question of
> when, not whether, somebody tries to hack into our LAN. So, even
> though the current system isn't set up with encryption, it will need
> to be encrypted at the very least.
Gold card is 13 bytes of encryption, Silver is only 5 bytes. You figure
it out. :)
Pick a secure password etc, and I think you'll be pretty safe.
Add ssh etc if you really want to be paranoid, and don't trust even your
own network.
Seth
