Wifi At Home, who is using it?

I have rebuilt home wifi system
resolved the reception problem in the kitchen
it's great for laptop or pda user, or for the users that unable to run the cable

Great idea, but I'm still holding off. I can think of one instance I would have to use it, and it would take some hardware hacks, I believe, to get it to go the few hundred yards to where I want it. Then I'd have to find a way to block access to anything from all but the one MAC address and not let anything else even ping another machine.... Coupled with the $100 for a one machine setup... and . . . ehhhh, not yet

if you have an ap or wireless router with 2 antennas, do this to improve the reception
1. put the device stand, or anyway that can make the antennas point up and down, make it looks like "T"
2. if your antenna is removable, go to radioshack, find replacement booster antenna (linksys version costs 30; dlink, which can be used on others, costs 20), each has 5dbi gain, this is true!

We have a large house with a cable modem in the guest room in one corner. I added a wireless router to talk to my kid's computer. It would have taken over 100 feet of cable run through the house to get a cable there. It works great.

Then when my mother-in-law came to live with us for a time, I moved the main computer out of the guest room. I left the cable modem and router there and connected all computers wirelessly. It gives great flexibility. Now that the M-i-l has her own place, the computer will move back in.

As far as wireless security goes, any wireless router can be set up to not broadcast the net ID and to only allow the MAC addresses for the given computer. With WPA encryption, it is not likely that anybody will get into your network. In fact, there are so many wide open networks out there, war drivers will ignore any networks with any kind of security. The only thing you have to worry about is a hacker who is located directly in your neighborhood.

We live in a fairly sparse neighborhood, with 100' between houses. I can see two wireless networks beside my own. One of those is unprotected. It looks like the router is configured with the default from the factory. It is relatively easy to enable security, but some people are clueless.

I agree with dfilpus, but must add one thing. I have a firewall installed on each machine. There isn't one on my router. So even if someone busts into my network they'll have to take the added steps of gettting around firewalls.

To begin with, I do local network consulting in home and small office networks, so I keep up to date on network security. When I found insecure networks accessible from my house, I was looking for business. All of what I said and what followis applies to a home network, which does not need security of a business situation.

A standard router is a firewall in that it does NAT translation. The IPs and MAC addresses of the machines behind the router are shielded from the outside. There are additional firewall functions that can be added to a router. There are routers available now that are labelled as firewall routers with have those built in.

In general, the firewall of NAT translation is good enough to keep the script kiddies and ping attacks out of your home computer.

I feel comfortable running a home Macintosh network behind a standard router with WEP. My next home router will have WPA instead of WEP and the enhanced firewall built in, but I am in no hurry to upgrade.

I have finished setting up wep
since I still can have unauthorized access even mac set up
then I do these:
wep (use hexkey is easier, no guess)
no ESSID boardcast
and...turn the wireless off when not in use (the most effective way)

We've got Wifi in our house, for the "not wanting to string cable" reason; WEP seems adequate, with firewalls on all the computers and a firewall in the router as well.

Interesting. So are you saying that running firewalls on the machines inside the network is overkill? I'm relatively new to the wi-fi networking deal. I'm more used to corporate networks.

I do have NAT setup with MAC address filtering and WEP encryption. Can I assume, based on what you're saying, that this is sufficient security?

Your last line is the point. In home networks, a single layer security is necessary to keep out the casual attackers and wardrivers. Multiple layers is generally not necessary. Running a firewall on a machine within the router will protect from malicious users within the network. You should be able to trust your users within a domestic network.

Domestic networks are much more vulnerable to spyware/adware, viruses and spam than to network attacks. Spending resources to detect/remove spyware/adware, viruses and spam is important. Internal firewalls will not help, except to protect other machines on the network if one of the machines gets compromised. However, all machines should be protected and all users should practice safe email and surfing to avoid viruses and spyware/adware.

• Run an adware/spyware agent such as Adaware or Spybot:Search and Destroy
• Turn off HTML in email.
• Never open attachments that you are not expecting.
• Run a virus detector/remover

We setup a wifi access point in our house off our main rj45 cable router. The reason was two fold.

First, the cable we had going to the computers in our living room was constantly being chewed up by our dog, Hunter. Yes, we tried to hide it behind the baseboard, but he somehow got it out. So we patched it, but I think we were suffering from signal loss.

The other reason is we wanted roaming internet access for the laptop. This works out good for "on the fly stuff" for the website and also when you don't feel like going all the way downstairs during the middle of the night to check your email.

For our main workstation in the living room we have a Dell that has both a Wifi PCI card and also a standard NIC card. This is because the kids HP computer is right next to the Dell (so we can keep a close eye what they are doing on the internet).

For the HP I didn't want the expense of buying another wifi card. Both computers already had a NIC, so I simply bought a cheap "cross over cable" and have the Dell share the internet connection with the HP. This also provides a good way to regulate internet access for the kids. If I don't want them using the internet I just shut off the Dell (which is sharing the internet access).

My only problem with this setup occurred a few weeks ago. I was in Boston with the laptop and had some time in the car to do a few things. I noticed many wifi access points and thought maybe there was some free internet access ones. Well, couldn't find any, but when I got home and tried using the laptop again it somehow messed up the entire wifi network.

For some reason the wifi network thought there were more wifi networks, almost like cached from boston, on the network. To make a long story short, everything stopped working on the wifi and I had to do a crash recovery of the firmware to get it working properly.

Not sure if anyone ever experienced this issue. I am thinking it was somesort of bug in the software of the access point, although I am not an expect when it comes to networks.