As much as I wanted to use wire, we use wireless. There is only one wired PC, which is the gutted laptop you can see on the first pic.bicostp wrote:Okay, first off if this is a desktop PC, it's always better to run a wire. The connection will be at least twice as fast, and here's no way to get into it from the street. Even if it's a laptop, run a wire to a wall plug so you can plug a patch cable into that and plug your laptop in. I'm serious, WiFi is a horrible thing to use on a daily basis, especially when you don't have to. It's just way too insecure.
Burn it out!?bicostp wrote:You might also want to turn the transmitter power down until you have about a 75% signal in your room. The fact that it froze
when you turned it up a little bit says that you're pushing that unit's limit. Runnin git that hard will most likely burn it out by the end of the year. Consumer grade APs aren't meant to do that much. If you really need more power, look into Cisco Aironet APs, which have a substantially larger range than anything you can buy at Circuit City (I could get about 600 feet down the road before the signal completely cut out), and have a 100 mw transmitter that was made to do that much. And turning it up way too much will only allow people farther away to break in.
The best place to put your AP is either the middle of the lower level with the antennas parallel to the ground, or at one end of the basement with the antennas at a 45 degree angle, projecting into the house. If the radio waves don't get to the street in the first place, people can't connect.
Luckily, the place I glued my router on is at one end, so I just have to walk to it and nudge the antenna to 45 degrees. When I did that, my signal increased even more, to 99%. I then toned down until I was at 50 milliwatts and my signal is at 90%. Is it ok?
Right! *disables SSID broadcast*bicostp wrote:As for other security, disable SSID broadcasting! It's a lot harder to break into your network when outsiders don't know the name. Also, WEP 1 is a joke and can be hacked in about 5 minutes. Use WEP 2. Also, enable MAC address filtering, only allowing your devices to connect. (MAC addresses can be faked, but they'll have to guess what MAC address to use.) While these kind of security measures can be compromised, the idea is to make it not worth the trouble to do so.
I'm using WPA 2. I filtered the MACs to the devices I own. Thanks for the heads up.
Does the integrated Firewall in the modded router count?bicostp wrote:The best thing to do is install a hardware firewall, and separate your AP from your hard-wired PCs, that way there's another level of security to get through.
Because I don't want my router's name to be changed to "Hello Aguiluz!"