Mud-club

Chat & Social => The Bar - General Chat => Topic started by: dazzawhipple on February 07, 2006, 18:55:37

Title: Home Wireless Network---Security
Post by: dazzawhipple on February 07, 2006, 18:55:37

Help I have been running on a wireless network, everything is fine but I relised that I havent set the sercurity settings

My system gives me two options WEP or WPA :shock:

I have hidden the SSID and changed my password but am at a loss on then next bit

Can anyone give me any pointers

Cheers

Darren

Title: Home Wireless Network---Security
Post by: chuggaman on February 07, 2006, 19:09:43

use wep and set up a numerical password


mike

Title: Home Wireless Network---Security
Post by: tomarse on February 07, 2006, 22:23:23

WPA is better than WEP, so choose that instead!

WPA is a newer standard which is harder to break than WEP. There is a bit of stuff about it in this link (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Protected_Access)

Title: Home Wireless Network---Security
Post by: strapping young lad on February 07, 2006, 22:52:27

or dont bother with wireless and have wired access points dotted around the house

much safer and cheaper ;)

Title: Home Wireless Network---Security
Post by: tomarse on February 07, 2006, 23:05:10

Quote from: "strapping young lad"

or dont bother with wireless and have wired access points dotted around the house

much safer and cheaper ;)

Much more reliable too!

It's hard work tidily installing cables round a house though - its much quicker to just plug in a wireless base station.

Title: Home Wireless Network---Security
Post by: Baby_Rhino on February 08, 2006, 00:27:38

our wireless is locked so only people with our password can use it, as we had been using our neighbours and didnt want anyone using ours  :wink:

Title: Home Wireless Network---Security
Post by: EvilEd on February 08, 2006, 00:39:52

WEP or WPA and lock it down by mac address and hide the SSID, not perfect, but will stop anyone but the most detemined. MAC address is the hardware address of the network card. Only main with that is if you get a new network card... drove me nits for several hours before I remembered I had locked down by MAC. Leave the NAT turned on too...

If you turn all your machines on, most routers will allow you to list the machines conneted and show the MAC address.

Passwords should be alphanumeric with upper and lower case. Something like 3ch0Ba5e (three, zero and five), if I remember correctly, 12 letters is the optimum for 24bit encryption, but it's been a while... :)

Even then, it's still not infallible, but not bad...

Hope that helps

EE :twisted:

Title: Home Wireless Network---Security
Post by: BigA on February 08, 2006, 09:32:59

you sorted this out Darren, if not give me a bell mate.

Andy

Title: Home Wireless Network---Security
Post by: dazzawhipple on February 08, 2006, 10:15:51

I've sort of done it :?  

I have used WEP but want to go to WPA but after taking nearly 3 hours to sort WEP I may not


Darren

Title: Home Wireless Network---Security
Post by: BigA on February 08, 2006, 10:31:10

you will be fine with WEP, so long as you have a decent length key. if you are still not sure how well its locked down, restrict it to MAC address too, but i would say this is still too much for home. We have over 50 WIFI points in the college, all using WEP, secure enough for us (having said that we are just looking into securing with certificates) and i have WIFI at home and just use WEP. I do however also connect to two of my neighbors that haven't locked down  :lol: