* In my last entry, I mentioned that I was configuring a wireless access point (actually the piece of equipment is a wireless “router”, but I’ve configured it as an access point) to be able to roam about the house with my laptop still connected (albeit wirelessly) to the network. What’s the first thing anybody does when they get their wireless connection working? Right! I ran around the house with my laptop in hand, checking my signal strength. (okay, I didn’t exactly run, more like I walked quite cautiously with the laptop) I was a bit surprised to see how well the signal propagated throughout the house. Not a single dead spot! The signal was excellent even out on the back porch. Now, I have not positioned the access point to optimally broadcast a full lobe in all directions, in fact it is in the basement against a concrete wall, situated about five feet below ground level. At this point I figured it might be a good time to see just how far the signal propagated at a level that allowed network connectivity. I quickly configured the laptop and wireless card to monitor the entire range of spectrum covered by the 802.11b range (with the help of some excellent -and widely available open source tools). I set the laptop on the passenger seat of the van and drove around the neighborhood. At this point I was truly shocked to see that my signal was available from as far as five houses away. The other thing that I found quite suprising was the number of other access points I was able to locate merely by driving a few blocks.
Several of these other access points were still set to their default configurations, and thereby allowing just about anyone to utilize their internet connection. So, as an FYI, here are a couple of recommendations that every wireless access point user needs to remember:
o Change the SSID, but don’t change it to personal information like say, your address or your last name.
o Enable WEP to encrypt your connection, but don’t rely on it to protect you, because it won’t. If you buy your sweetie a gift over the web, and you use your credit card, that number can very easily be grabbed, and the level of encryption utilized by most wireless routers is quite easy to defeat.
o Disable DHCP. This is the mechanism that allows the router to indiscriminately hand out connections to just about anyone who wants one. Including encrypted connections. Choose a non-standard sub-net and assign a static IP to your laptop or desktop. Sure, DHCP makes connecting easier, but not just easier for you, easier for anyone driving by.
o Last, but not least, enable MAC address filtering. This tells the router to only accept connections from a specific network card (each card has a unique, identifying address that is seperate from the assigned IP). The drawback is that if your network card goes bad, and it needs to be replaced, you need to have an alternate method of connecting to the router to change the list of acceptable MAC addresses.
Like everything else, even a MAC address can be faked, so take this all with a grain of salt… These steps will NOT, I repeat WILL NOT guarantee that your network won’t be compromised, but these steps will make it more difficult for your assets to be abused. Comments? Corrections? Please add them below!
Entered at 16:54PM
Time for a few updates before the weekend is over…
Lets start off with the laptop… Of course I couldn’t just leave well enough alone, I had to make some ::ahem:: adjustments. The system comes stock with WindowsXP Home, so the first thing I did was re-partition the 40GB drive and re-installed XP on a little 8GB slice. I split the rest into three chunks, 15GB for Debian Linux, 15GB for FreeBSD 5.0 and the rest for swap space. (overkill on the swap, I’m sure…) I found a nifty little procedure on how to get the ghosted WinXP rescue disks to allow me to repartition the drive and reinstall the image on the newly resized slice. You can read the originals here. After that, the linux and bsd installs were pretty much no-brainers. I installed linux first, then FreeBSD, and ended up going back into the Debian install to reconfigure LILO to recognize all three O/S’es.
Ahhh… A triple-boot system!!! Life is good!! (Now if I could only get OS/X to run on it….)
I picked up a Linksys Wireless router and pcmcia card to start messing around with 802.11b. It took about thirty minutes to get things set up w/ encryption and such. (not that I trust it, mind you) I will say that I am quite surprised at how well the signal propagates from the back corner of my basement. I haven’t done any drive-by’s of the house yet to map the footprint, but I intend to do just that later this week.
So the unveiling of the new website was originally scheduled for this weekend. I have decided to push it back a few more days (perhaps another week) to tie together a few loose details…
Entered at 22:25PM
That penguin is showing up everywhere!!!
* Noticed over the weekend that my pages do not render very nicely at all with the Safari web browser. I have been slowly removing all of my old crufty bits from the site-code and trying to make it both CSS compliant as well as XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant. My stylesheet does in fact validate, but there are a couple of warnings that need to be cleaned up. As far as the XHTML validation, well, let’s just say that although I’ve removed a great deal, I still have a very long way to go.
Entered at 12:52PM
* I have finally made a purchase of a new laptop, specifically a Toshiba 1905-S301 ( P4 2.0Ghz, 256mb, 40GB, DVD/CD-RW) It’s not a model listed on the linux for laptops site, but I hope to remedy that. With what you might ask? Well, with Debian, of course! I am pretty much a total convert thanks to apt-get! I still use the BSDs in server situations, (firewalls, etc) but I am beginning to favor Debian for my main workstation more and more (I’m composing this email on an Ultrasparc I running Debian Woody with a stock 2.4.18 kernel (I keep breaking strange things when I recompile the 2.4.18 or 19 sources…)
Entered at 20:30PM
Comments
I have been shopping for a new laptop for a few weeks, stopping in at the Apple store about once a week. I was absolutely thrilled with Jobs’ keynote and the announcement of the 12″ powerbook. What an awesome little machine! Unfortunately, even with the amazing prices, I find my capital budget for hardware to be somewhat less than what is necessary to properly fund an Apple purchase at this point. I did play with the iBooks as well, and although they were well within my budget, the lack of power presented by the G3 was quite noticeable. I judged this merely by the time it took to load and/or switch between apps. (one of which was Safari) So, while I had Safari running, I pulled up my site and was less than thrilled with its rendering. I know my code isn’t the cleanest, especially with me re-writing things all the time, but sheesh, even IE renders the site pretty well. Posted Mon Feb 3 20:30:35 CST 2003
From: Jeff
How do you know that they don’t render well with Safari? Did you get a Power Mac?Posted Mon Feb 3 19:39:17 CST 2003
From: Charlie Sebold http://www.livingtorah.org/journal/
STS-107 has broken up over Texas, just after re-entry for a scheduled landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Details are available at NASA and CNN
Jeff, Journal | Jeff | 
February 12, 2003 12:10 am | 
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