Wireless infrastructure advances

Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 01 Mar 2006 06:59:00 GMT

I guess it’s officially spring cleaning time; after 6 years of open access, I finally turned on encryption for my home wireless network. For years, I had my wireless network on a different subnet then my wired network, and then used my Linux router/firewall to protect the two from each other. When I first set up the network, my access point was limited to 40-bit WEP. Since 40-bit WEP is effectively the same as an open network, I never bothered turning encryption on at all. I’ve swapped access points every few years since then, but I never had a pressing need for better security–everything that I use my laptop for uses either SSH or SSL, and the firewall between the two networks wasn’t really a problem for me.

Over the past year, though, a few new problems have cropped up. The biggest problem with a split network is that no Rendezvous/Bonjour-based services can cross between networks, and that’s become increasingly painful–I couldn’t print from my wireless network or access any shared iTunes songs. Also, my wife is now using my old PowerBook, and she didn’t really appreciate the technical reasons why sometimes things didn’t work right when the laptop wasn’t plugged into an Ethernet cable.

So, tonight I finally bit the bullet and redid things. I’m now using two access points on different channels, both sharing the same SSID and WAP pre-shared key. I can wander around the house transparently roaming between APs, so I finally have 100% coverage in my house. Both APs are Linksys WRT-54G series devices (one -54G, and one -54GL) running DD-WRT, which seems simple enough for what I need. I’m really just using the two boxes as simple access points; I don’t need (or want) them to route anything, but I *do* want working SSH and syslog.

I’m still recovering from The Big Drive, so I’ll have to finish the last bit of work (decommissioning the old wireless subnet and firewall and re-routing my office Ethernet cables) tomorrow. I’ll also have a few Typo roadmap updates ready soon.

Update: In order to work with my old PowerBook (handed down to my wife), I had to drop from WPA2 TKIP+AES to WPA2 TKIP. Apparently older Airport hardware can’t handle WPA2 AES. Other then that, everything seems to be working perfectly.

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Sitting on the couch, after all these years

Posted by Scott Laird Thu, 29 Jan 2004 13:32:38 GMT

We’ve had a wireless network at home for over 3.5 years, and I’ve had a wireless-equipped PowerBook for almost two years. In all that time, I’ve never managed to get the laptop to work wirelessly from anyplace actually useful. This is a generic failing of the Titanium PowerBooks–their wireless antenna is inside of a big, titanium faraday cage, leaving them with a frustratingly short range. So, I haven’t been able to use the laptop from the living room couch, or from the bedroom. Instead, I’ve been limited to 30 or so feet, which draws the line somewhere in the middle of the dining room.

Until today. A couple weeks ago our second wireless access point died. It was a cheap (at the time) SMC, which replaced the original Apple “UFO” base station which basically melted itself down. I was faced with a dilemma–I could buy a high-power wireless card and antenna, plug it all into one of my Linux boxes, and then run HostAP, or I could buy another cheap AP. In the end, I decided that it was better to have a working network now then to wait for the HostAP hardware to arrive via FedEX, so we bought a Linksys WRT54G. The nice thing about this specific model is that it runs Linux under the hood, and there are a few hacked firmware loads for it that give it a number of features that Linksys never planned on. Including the ability to crank the transmitter power from a wimpy (but common) 30 mW up to 84 mW. It’s not the 200 mW that high-end stuff can handle, but it’s good enough to finally let me sit on the couch and use the computer. It only took two years.

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