Last Updated on September 30, 2010 by Dave Farquhar
Well, I took the plunge. What good is credit when you don’t use it, right? I didn’t want to run CAT5 Ethernet cable everywhere and I didn’t want to spend hours playing with Linux drivers for phone-line networks that have been in beta for a year. Especially not with what few Usenet posts mention those drivers also mentioning kernel panics. No thanks.
Dan Bowman pointed out that JustDeals had good prices available on wireless gear. So I picked up a plain-old access point for $70 (I don’t want a combo access point/router/switch because I want something I can turn off when I’m not using it–can’t beat that for security) and a PCMCIA NIC for $29 and a pair of USB NICs for $29. That’ll let me put a computer in the front room and a computer in the spare room and it’ll let me wander around with my work laptop.
Dirt-cheap prices, no rebate hassles. Gotta love it. CompUSA’s prices on Netgear kit are good, but there are rebates involved, which is always a pain.
My plan for security, besides powering off the access point when I’m not using it, is to turn off DHCP, hard-code it to my NICs, turn on 128-bit WEP, use obnoxious passphrases, and place the access point as far from the outside wall as possible. That should give me acceptable security, especially considering the physical location of my house. Neither of my next-door neighbors has a wireless LAN, and I seriously doubt the neighbors behind me do either, and they’re pretty far back and might even be out of range anyway. I’m at the end of a street deep in a residential area, so most wardrivers probably won’t bother. And if they do, I’ll be home and I’ll probably see them.
One thing I learned today, which reveals my ignorance yesterday, is that most wireless NICs accept the “Any” parameter that we used to get a Linksys NIC talking with a 3Com access point so we could configure it. But your documentation may or may not mention it.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.
Sounds like a plan 🙂 The part about just turning off the AP when you’re not using it is simplicity itself. I ordered one of those Linksys “combo access point/router/switch” devices and made sure you could go into the config and easily toggle wireless mode ON/OFF.
Be sure to configure your AP to only talk to your wireless card(s) MAC addr & set the SSID to something other than the default and you should be as good to go as possible w/o running Cisco’s LEAP…
I have heard of people using a router w/ ssh port forwarding to allow access to their wlans. This means that the wardrivers can sniff your network all they want but can’t access it without hacking your ssh server. Ars has an article covering wlan security. Check it out. http://arstechnica.com/paedia/w/wireless/security-1.html
I have heard of people using a router w/ ssh port forwarding to allow access to their wlans. This means that the wardrivers can sniff your network all they want but can’t access it without hacking your ssh server. Ars has an article covering wlan security. Check it out. http://arstechnica.com/paedia/w/wireless/security-1.html