Wireless Networks

wirelessdawg · December 20th, 2002, 12:35 AM

Hey, how many of you are doing wireless networks or thinking about wireless in your home or business?
Reason I ask is that is what I do and if you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Other than what I have said above, what type of hardware firewall do you all suggest?

DVNT1 · December 20th, 2002, 08:28 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by wirelessdawg
Hey, how many of you are doing wireless networks or thinking about wireless in your home or business?
Reason I ask is that is what I do and if you have any questions, feel free to ask...

I do some wireless networking and am glad to have your expertise here too!

As for which router, I think it will depend on what capabilities you want. For instance, I wanted a router with remote logging built in, VPN support, advanced filtering rules, and DynDNS.org support. One like this is often over $200 but you can get a basic one for around $50 or even cheaper at times.

Were you looking for a lot of features or something simple and inexpesive that has good reliabity?

kwebb · December 20th, 2002, 10:49 AM

Been engineering, installing and supporting wireless LAN's and WAN's since about mid 97. Most Cisco and some Lucent stuff for 802.11b equipment. Western Mux and Wi-Lan mostly for 5 Ghz bridging. At the moment I have a cheap little speedstream 2624 AP/Router combo at the house. I've been pleasantly suprised with it. 5.5 dBi dipole with excellent range, decent features and no reboots since I've had it (4 months)

Bones1 · December 20th, 2002, 11:32 AM

I have a question for you guys.

I have a d-link wireless access point and my frind has a wireless Linksys access point. They bouth are using the 2.4Ghz freq.

Does it matter that we have two different manufacture's? Can we still hookup our networks together?

Does it matter if it is computers or X-box's? Any special settings I should look into?

Thanks

Jim

kwebb · December 20th, 2002, 12:04 PM

Bridging can be a little tricky. Bridging is not an official part of the 802.11b specification. The spec says than any 802.11b client card should associate to any 802.11b Access Point but that doesn't necessarily mean if you turn your AP into Bridge mode, that it will associate to another Mfg's bridge. No harm in trying. It might work. Bridging will however eliminate any wireless clients associated to the device. Well that is a general rule. I saw a post on some BBS where a guy said a firmware update allowed his AP to handle both tasks. Cisco BR series have always done this so it's certainly possible but I always recommended against it.

Anyway, you can also set on of the AP's up as a workgroup bridge (WGB). Linksys calls it "client mode". That would allow the parent AP to remain as an AP. The WGB would associate to the parent AP as a client and feed a PC with a wireless card or a hub/switch through its RJ-45 port. That device would also not allow any wireless client to associate to it so your taking away an AP on one side of the link. If you really want to connect your two LAN's i'd suggest buying dedicated devices and bridge them so you can maintain your current WLAN but as you can see there are a few ways to do it with the hardware you have. You just have to consider the resources that will be taken away from you to do it.

Oh, and you need line of sight and possibly might need aftermarket directional antennas. It just depends on how close you are.

Bopper · December 20th, 2002, 07:34 PM

I work in Tech support at the Big Moo, and Ran across someone that had gotten an Intel Wireless access point from us, and had a D-linkwireless card(3rd party). all 802.11b. we only support an orinoco card with this A.P., so in looking over the info on the access point it states we should be able to use any card as long as we enter tha Mac address into the correct spot in the config of the A.P., we did this, and it still didn't work. he went and bought an orinoco card, and it worked fine. I guess some things do not work together sometimes, even though they should.

CatCheeto · December 20th, 2002, 09:05 PM

We are just starting out a wireless network, I don't remember what the brand it is off hand. I do know that it has WEP up to 128 and we can do something about limiting which mac addresses can access. Are these good ideas? I know they can probably be gotten around, but are they worth the extra time. Also, is there any other things I should look for? We are mainly concerned with speed, but not at the cost of all security. What are the disadvantages to WEP and the Mac blocking thing (and what is it called incase I should happen to have to ask more about it?)

**GroundZero3** · December 21st, 2002, 11:13 AM

Enabling WEP is a very good idea. There are a lot of things people can do with an open wireless network. People can sit outside your building and hack into your pc's. And if you get someone who doesn't care can just kill your hard drive losing everything on it if you don't have it save somewhere else or backed up. i would enable WEP and any other wireless security out there. War driving is becoming very easy these days especially with kits that come with a nice antenna and Orincco card

As for speeds decreasing the max for 802.11b is 11 mbps. Now if you are constant sending large amounts of data over the wireless most likely will not notice a difference. If you are constantly sending large amount of data over. Wireless wasn't a good choice in the first place.

for more info on the mac address its called mac filtering

wirelessdawg · December 23rd, 2002, 09:56 PM

MAC filtering is the best way, in my opinion to do Security. But, of course, WEP is a nice feature as well, as long as you make the network a closed newtork. Turn off the broadcast of the SSID. If you are starting out a network, look at this website for some products, http://www.pacific-skylan.com
They sell Orinoco products and other products. I have a networking running off an AP-2000 and running their PSN-PCRUBY card. Very cool and very easy set up on this stuff...