Hello Again All,
I am a bit over protective with my security on my WLan:
I live on a small side street (.25 mile long) 3.5 miles from
the center of town. There are no neighbors within reach of my wireless
lan, and in fact I have issues connecting occasionally with the laptop
in the car in my driveway. Signal is completely non existant at the
road end of the driveway.
Although I allow the SSID to be transmitted, I have WPA-SKA
enabled, along with MAC filtering.
I have had no known hack attempts on this, then again, I have
never had a reason to suspect one, therefore no reason to check.
I have found issues with various wireless gear, such as an XBox
adapter when trying to use encryption (in that case WEP) but a MAC
filter is an absolute must. The MAC filter will keep someone from
connecting, and either WEP (which can be broken relatively easily) or
WPA-SKA will prevent the wireless signals from being transmitted
without encryption, so someone cannot run a packet sniffer and monitor
your wireless lan without connecting.
MACs can be cloned, WEP broken, WPA-SKA broken if you catch
someone just signing on - but its all about slowing down the
incidental / casual hacker - the serious one cannot be blocked, but
slowed down.
Incidently, I did install Mepis on my ex Girlfriends laptop,
and it installed correctly, but the Linksys 802.11b card she was using
(forget the model number) was not compatible or had no usable driver.
Ended up going back to Windows on it, as she couldn't live without her
wireless and the option of buying another card was outside her
financial grasp (poor college student) - that was my brief WLan
experience with Mepis, but its fully installed on my desktop at home,
and it is the most stable OS I've EVER run. I cannot recall any times
when it has crashed when it wasn't my fault (ie knocking a hard drive
cable loose).
Just my thoughts!
Also - Mepis has an excellent support board - almost everything
about the OS can be found on the Newbie section believe it or not -
and it has a built in packet updating tool. Name escapes me at the
moment - but I have it at home if needed.
cya, Joey
