[TriLUG] Wireless stuff

Greg Brown gwbrown1 at gmail.com
Thu May 26 15:57:25 EDT 2005


Before I switch to M0n0wall for my firewall and OpenWRT for my AP I
had some issues with WEP over 802.11 to my (at the time) RH 7.3 laptop
using an Orinoco Silver card (I'm amazed it worked at all, quite
frankly).  Anyway, my ugly solution was to plug the AP directly into a
second Ethernet card on my linux box then firewall most everything and
force to use of tunnels for web, e-mail, and everything else I wanted
to do.  I would open other ports as needed (FTP, etc).

This worked, and worked well in the sense that all my data over the
wireless net was encrypted and person X couldn't use my network
(unless they tunneled through my firewall to another secure proxy on
the far side).

Today I might just use a capture and release portal on the firewall. 
Better yet I would upgrade (or downgrade) the code on the linksys and
go from there.  Good luck!

Oh - one other thing.  Download MacStumbler (or netstumbler).  Look at
what signals are being used and which are the most congested, then set
your channel to where there is no signal or where the signal is least
strong.  Also, it really is possible to split a wireless signal into
four channels (though the standard really recommends three - and it is
technically best to use three unless you have a compelling reason to
use four).

The three "normal" channels for 802.11b/g are 1, 6, and 11.  However,
because most of the data transmission is done on a curve with the
highest amounts of the data packed towards the center of that curve
you can use channels 1, 4, 8, and 11.  Again, you really only should
do that when you know it's needed, and without a true spectrum
analyzer it's hard to do, but this is how I have one of my beach
networks set up at the outer banks.

Greg

On 5/26/05, Rock Roskam <Rock.Roskam at sas.com> wrote:
> I have some wifi wierdness but generally it works.  I live in the flight path for RDU and wondererd if that can affect wireless things.  The following weird things happen.
> 
> Airplane flies over my cordless phone crackles. When on a cell phone the call is dropped a lot when airplanes are flying over.
> 
> My wireless has become better by.
>         -neighbor with all the 2.4 phones moved. By the way his phones started having problems when I upped my power on the router.
>         -switched from channel 6 default.
>         -do not put a halogen lamp between you and the access point
>         -boosted the power on my router
> 
> Is there a way to secure WEP?  My linux boxes have a hard time connecting with so I dropped it and now just turn on the wireless when needed.  But my router does not support WPA and I was curious about how people are securing the old wep only routers.  Can the new firmwares for the linksys wrt54g add WPA?  With the 4 other unsecured routers I can see from my house even MAC security and WEP seems better than nothing.
> 
> Rock
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