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Do any of you use encryption with your wi-fi routers? I've been contemplating it and the jury seems to still be out on it. Any prevailing feelings?

I use WPA and no broadcast - WEP is rather easliy hacked, as I saw personally and you can find via google rather quickly.

I also NEVER broadcast my SSID.

So under this approach, only machines with MAC addresses I've pre-registered will see the SSID?

Sorry, I'd test and see for myself, but my girl's out of town and my laptop is still on its way.

I just turned on the MAC filter on mine (gotta keep those dirty MAC's outa my network).

Yes, you can do all kinds of crap, but I live in a house (not an apartment), so the chances of someone driving up and parking in front of my house just to OMG HACKZOR MY NETWORK is pretty damn slim (and if they did sit there to sniff the 5 - 10 GB of packets they'd need to get in... all they would see is the kids playing WOW and me looking at hardcore goat pr0n).

My neighbors "could" hack in if they A) wanted to or B) were smart enough. I doubt either to be the case.

So I don't worry about it much. For most networks, just turning on the MAC filter is pry enough.

I would use mac filtering, and throw on wpa if you're in a crowded area. Here's some information on hiding the ssid. Unfortunately SSID's are easily detectable, access points happily broadcast them when asked by a machine to connect. Also, it depends how many networks are near you, but not broadcasting can lead to association problems.

I think it boils down to throwing enough road blocks in the way of people that want to get in. There's TONS of easy picking out there, so they'll move on. Think how many people get their router from Circuit City, plop it on their network, amazed it actually works, and move on. Plenty of no authentication, no encryption networks out there.

To show you how far it can go, our company ap's authenticate your network account, the access points radio power is reduced enough to just cover the physical building, and data is encrypted with a key that changes every 10 minutes. I don't think most consumer radios have the ability to control the power, though.

I use WEP, broadcast the ssid, and no MAC filtering. Was gonna turn on the filtering, but I'm too stupid to figure it out on my own, and too lazy to read up on it.

Haven't had any issues so far... that I know of.

One of these days I'll hopefully figure it out.

Here's some default info. The config web page can be a couple different addresses, like 192.168.1.1, 192.168.0.1, etc. (or find your default gateway with ipconfig from a command prompt).

moe flam wrote:Think how many people get their router from Circuit City, plop it on their network, amazed it actually works, and move on. Plenty of no authentication, no encryption networks out there.

Those are the poeople who have problems. Many, MANY times I've opened my laptop up and browsed for a network, only to find the SID of "Linksys" out ther, ready for me to connect to... so I do.

Then I go to the router itself (not hard figuring out the IP address for it) and attempt to log in using the default username and password. Then I change the SID to something more entertaining!

Sure... that's bad... but in nearly every case, when I went back a week later, the SID was reset to something less humorous and the password had been changed to something more secure (a little constructive vandalism can encourage people to read the damn manual... or at least the stupid 4 page "quick setup guide").

moe flam wrote:...the access points radio power is reduced enough to just cover the physical building...

which totally explains why I can never EVER get on the network from my cube (zero signal).[/list]

bio wrote:which totally explains why I can never EVER get on the network from my cube (zero signal).

At the new building? Even though there was an ap around the corner from your sullivan cube, that corner of the building didn't get good coverage (also one down in the SE corner).

This new building is, um, fragmented to say the least, should be challenging getting decent coverage around.

At the old building. I'll be testing the new building this weekend to find the "sweet spots"

By the way, miftah.... what the hell does TIONPRYENC mean?

I sent it through Google, MSN Search and Yahoo and came up with 0 hits. For the record, I did the same with my own name and found nothing related to me, apperently, TIONPRYENC and I are fated to no meaning. I'm ok with it, but TIONPRYENC may become somewhat volitile due to public ignorance of it's needs.

Its encryption. Scrambled. Like it was encrypted. Badly.

Incidentally, if I don't broadcast the SSID, guess who can't see it to log onto it. If you guessed the owner of the router, you guessed correctly.

bio wrote:At the old building. I'll be testing the new building this weekend to find the "sweet spots"

We probably won't have wireless up, except in IT of course, until next week sometime. Its low on the list right now.

Incidentally, if I don't broadcast the SSID, guess who can't see it to log onto it. If you guessed the owner of the router, you guessed correctly.

The Windows client is most susceptible to this problem, other clients (Like Intel, Linksys, etc) seem to handle this better.