Wireless router question

[Flying Lawyer]

Is a wireless router likely to work reliably on every floor of a 4-storey house?
Wooden floors with carpets, and fairly thick brick interior walls - the way they used to build them circa 1810.

Am I likely to need two? Or more?
If so, would that cause any conflict problems?

Thanks.

FL

[Evo]

It's unlikely to work, even if you position the router in the middle of the house. Mine struggles in a much more modest house built circa 1820. We have a brick chimney running through the centre of the house and the other side of that is dead to wireless.

You can get repeaters which effectively boost and forward your signal, and they work quite well - if you get kit from the same company. Mix and match may sometimes work, but it's full of problems. Remember too that the repeaters need a strong signal to the base station, otherwise you will be reduced to a slower speed even if you can get a strong signal from the repeater.

[Helli-Gurl]

If you have two wireless routers you'll need to create a bridge between the two as routers can only route between two seperate networks otherwise. this is pretty straightford tho but a bit of a pain and something we try to avoid in comms.

My wirless router works fine over large distances, I live in a grpoup of thick walled barn conversions and my friends accross the large courtyard can use my internet connection with no real problems.

I't try a router and see how you get on...some are better than others

x

[Mishandled]

I'd also make sure that the wireless box that you do buy has detachable antennae, so that you can replace them with longer ones. This does increase the range, sometimes significantly.

[Conan the Librarian]

Actually I disagree that it is unlikely to get a signal throughout the household. Down here we have 19 inch Cotswold Stone Walls ( happy memories of BT trying to drill through it...) and my Netgear 384G blasts straight through that. If you do get probs with a chimney column or other local probs, then you can often fix this by moving the router just a few feet. A bit like a mob phone it can be annoying, but once you have the optimum spot, it ain't going to move again.

If you DO need to extend the range there are various extenders, access points etc. and you won't have any headaches there.

One point worth mentioning though. A lot (never seen one yet that hasn't!) of routers and similar need to be powered down and rebooted once in a while. If yours happens to be in the loft and if you have not RTFM, then you might end up with an inconvenient climb to get to it. Make sure that you configure access to your router via the browser and are able to reboot from there.

I would never go back to life without wireless.

good luck!

[HughMartin]

A lot will depend on the quality of the remote PC or laptop. I have a Gericom laptop with integral WiFi which comunicates with my Belkin router which is in the centre of my house through two 18 inch thick granite walls out into my garden quite happily with about 70-80% signal level. A friend brought round a Dell laptop with a plug in WiFi card and it was only managing about 15-20% signal strength with a corresponding reduction in transmission speed.

[spekesoftly]

FL,

If you scroll towards the bottom of This Link, you'll find a table headed:-

"Wireless router percentage of detectable signal"


It gives some indication of comparative signal degradation through walls.

[IO540]

Firstly, it's virtually certain that repeaters (or additional access points; one can get a straight wireless access point which is not a router) will be needed. The stuff goes through timber and breezeblock OK but thicker walls are are problem. I've seen a single wall block the signal completely.

Coincidentally this morning I have done a measurement of this, using top-notch Cisco 100mW gear in my house, and it just makes it through two block walls. The 3rd wall kills it.

A wireless access point with a directional antenna (pointing generally INTO the house) would help.

Secondly, knowing the occupation of the original poster (and assuming he does occassional work related emails from home) I would consider some serious security He's a prime target for some high-class sniffing. WPA is a minimum here, but it doesn't work with every 802.11 wifi laptop. One could run a VPN but few "VPN" wifi routers will support a VPN to their internal wifi access point - they do it only to the WAN port.

One can't beat a run of cable for reliability, simplicity, compatibility, and difficulty in eavesdropping.

[18greens]

I run wireless in a three storey house with concrete floors and ceilings no problems.

Give it a go, move it around, install WEP , use a wire for the sensitive stuff and you should be OK.

Incientally I can connect to 8 networks around my house so the power is pretty good. Amazingly only one of them is encrypted.

[Keef]

My wireless router is in my study upstairs, and covers the whole house and garden with no trouble. My neighbour the far side from where the wireless box sits can't quite connect to my network, but he's four brick walls and 50 yards away. It's very much down to quality of the WiFi device, and antenna placement.

My "other" hobby (amateur radio) taught me the vagaries of antennas and how they behave. Just putting on a longer piece of wire won't cut it: the antenna needs to be resonant. You can do clever things with extension antennas, but then you can do it easier with a LAN cable to a remote WiFi unit.

My tips would be:
1. Avoid Belkin - I've never had any success with anything of theirs.
2. Get a WiFi with two antennas - that's diversity operation. Results are likely to be far better than with a single antenna.
3. Make sure the WiFi manufacturer sells a suitable "repeater", in case you find you need one. Mixing brands of repeaters isn't a game for the faint-hearted.
4. If you need a repeater: they are pretty simple to use - get the network running satisfactorily first, then add the repeater, located where there's still a good signal from the primary, but in the direction where you have problems.

[PPRuNe Towers]

Time for a sideways and secure look perhaps Tudor?

Have a gander at the Devolo MicroLink dLan which uses your electric mains around the house to transmit at around 14Mbps.

Derived from the 'Homeplug' system you just plug in a translucent blue wall socket and pop a standard ethernet cable into the base of it. Next, connect the other end of the cable into your router/switch or ADSL modem. Add further sockets anywhere else you want around the house and you're in business - no setup, no drivers, no software at all - just connect.

Each socket is encrypted and your meter blocks any data escaping your property. A starter pack is £99 quid and a search on devolo will get you to their site.

Wireless is wonderful and it's well worth trying to see if it can work in Chez Owen but there are always excellent alternatives to the mainsteam bandwagon.

Regards
Rob

[Keef]

Trouble with the mains-borne variety is that you have to use a mains socket. Rather puts a damper on G&T on the lawn while nonchalantly doing one's e-mail.

[IO540]

What algorithms does the mains stuff use? Are they published? If not, the security is likely to be rubbish. The electricity meter isn't likely to block it either. Years ago I used to install incoms for old peoples' homes that worked over the mains.

Yesterday I drove for 10 minutes with netstumbler on a PDA, picked up 20 access points of which 10 were open.

The rest were plain "64-bit" WEP, and if those networks are used for something that routinely carries a lot of data (e.g. driving a printer) then airsnort would recover the key in an hour or so.

This was just with an old PDA that's sitting in a hands free kit running a GPS road nav package - not a lot else works on this PDA! The range was poor; one would have to park right in front of the house. But anyone doing this for a "job" would have a directional aerial and would be easily doing it from several hundred metres away.

Either, this needs to be done properly, or one should just lay some twisted pair cabling around the house.

[PPRuNe Towers]

Mixed system would do nicely though Keef.

I wouldn't like to be tied down by cable either but the fact is a significant proportion of the computing in my home is fixed base and a cable would be fine for 2 or 2.5 of the 4 computers in the Towers.

Everyone has different needs and no one had suggested an alternative to the usual wireless bandaid/bandwagon in a potentially difficult location.

Regards to all,
Rob Lloyd

PS Encryption is 56 bit - the CAA would have to call in someone else to help them snoop

[BEagle]

The prospect of spotty little geeks roaming around with their PDAs snooping for private W-LAN hotspots hardly fills me with dread.

But, IO540, people who describe how to invade the privacy of others should consider their actions carefully. Yes, there is software designed by geeks to break into the legitimate W-LANs of others, but please don't make it easier for the little swine to do so.

If Plod had caught you driving around snooping as you were, I wonder what would have happened. "Going equipped to commit a crime" springs to mind.....

[Toxteth O'Grady]

Valid point, Beags.

There is of course the counter-argument that publicising how easy it is to Wardrive raises security awareness by highlighting the risks to the uninitiated.

Too many in the WiFi domain suffer from the 'ignorance is bliss' syndrome when it comes to security.

Better they find out from posts such as IO540's on here just how vulnerable they potentially are: they can then take steps to counter the threat before they suffer the consequences of their lack of security.

btw - tools such as Netstumbler are very useful for ensuring the integrity of your own network.



TOG

[BEagle]

What on earth is 'wardriving'? Is that the activity of geeks driving around trying to locate and access private WLANs with their purpose-designed spyware?

Truly there are some sad, sick people around these days.

Why don't they just bugger off and MIND THEIR OWN BUSINESS? If they are caught trying to spy on others, they should have every finger of both hands broken. Slowly.......

[Evo]

I'd agree with IO540. The information and software needed to go breaking into wireless networking can be trivially found online, and by talking about the vulnerability of wireless networks PPRuNe isn't going to suddenly make things worse. However, it might hopefully make some people reading this forum consider what settings they are using on their wireless kit. It's easy enough for the majority with no interest in computers and no desire to learn more than they have to, and for those with an interest i'd agree that playing with the tools themselves is a good way to educate yourself about your network.

These days any PC user needs to understand the security they have when they connect to the outside world. For the internet, a black box solution from someone you can reasonably trust is fine, so installing zone alarm and forgetting about it is fine. At the moment wireless needs a little more care, mainly because wireless access points are quite so opaque from the novice end-user perspective. Default settings on a router are hopeless. I don't know why they aren't shipped with pre-shared-key encryption turned on and a floppy containing the (unique, not default) key that autoconfigures each client, but they aren't - and that means that the user needs to do something about it. It's not hard, and if most people who don't know a thing about computers and don't want to (the majority, these days) can run a firewall then they can fix up wireless too.

Actually I do know why they aren't shipped with pre-shared key turned on; (a) it would be extra effort for the box-shifters and (b) it would generate support calls from those too dumb or lazy to insert the floppy disk. The manufacturers would rather avoid that than sell something secure out of the box. Microsoft appear to have had similar views a few years ago, so we can hope.

Finally, a quick example of why I think wireless security is important. My neighbour got wireless recently. How do I know? I got home, turned on my thinkpad and its pre-installed software told me it had detected a new wireless network, did I want to connect? I went round to talk to him about it. He suggested I connect; his C drive was shared on the wireless network, 5 seconds later and I had his Microsoft Money datafile in Windows explorer - so all his bank account details are available to anybody parked outside his house. Now, if we were having a feud about fences, garden sheds or any other thing that neighbours row about then I could completely him over in 15 seconds - a choice download copied over, suitably proxied, of course, and a call to the police. "I was cleaning my windows and I saw him...". All thanks to an out of the box Netgear WAP. Personally I find that pretty frightening!

BEagle - wardriving depends on your point of view. You might use the term to refer to finding an open wireless access point to use check your email. You might also wish to hack it. The former probably vastly outweighs the latter. It can even be a hobby akin to trainspotting, finding and mapping the local WAPs. Oh, and unlawful use is dealt with by "use of a computer for a purpose for which you do not have permission", not "going equipped to commit a crime"

And spare the "breaking fingers" stuff for jetblast, please.

[Toxteth O'Grady]

What on earth is 'wardriving'?

Deja Vu

Altzheimers kickin' in there, Beags?



TOG

[IO540]

Beagle

Don't worry, I don't do this for a living

All I did was put my PDA into its hands-free kit (normally it's running road nav software, which for £100 enables me to drive blindly to any address anywhere in the UK without any effort except driving the car), start up one of the above mentioned programs, and drive along the road at 30mph.

The thing is pinging away every 500ms and every time it sees an access point it logs it, optionally together with its GPS position. If I was a proper SOG (sad old git) I would then contribute this data to one of the databases of open access points.

I don't think PC Plod would know what this was if it bit him on the nose.

The program would even run in the background with the mapping software running on top. But the two can't share the GPS - a real shame, isn't it

I work in electronics which is how I know about it. The reality is that anybody who takes the trouble to read Personal Computer World on the train for half an hour every month will also know about it.

Getting back to the original subject, a well known lawyer wouldn't last more than a week without being the subject of a professional operation. There are LOTS of people who do this for a living, and it is the easiest thing to do. The directional aerials in particular are very cheap and make it easy to do this from a distance. FAR easier and safer than tapping a phone, especially a mobile one. The great thing is that if somebody is printing from a wifi-connected computer to a remote printer, the listener gets the full print data too. Great for getting copies of a lawyer's correspondence with clients who are not on fax or who don't want to use fax/email because the matter is too sensitive.

But you don't have to be a lawyer. It is virtually certain that any neighbour also running wifi will quickly discover that there is another network nearby. If he is honest he will ignore it. If he isn't.....?? Running a wireless network is like saying to neighbours "hey, I have some potentially confidential data here, and I bet you can't read it". Turning off SSID broadcast will solve that (often at the cost of creating hassle setting up new network connections especially if using encryption) but it won't stop somebody targeting somebody deliberately.

I run my wifi LAN with SSID disabled, with an access list containing just the laptops that should have access, and with WPA/PSK/TKIP. Only the last bit actually does anything for security; the others just remove the open invitation to the neighbours and to anybody driving by with their wireless-enabled laptop on the car seat. There are no plausible attacks on WPA/PSK in the public domain. The router is a Draytek 2900.

The other thing to appreciate is that - short of additional hardware - anybody who gains access to the wifi access point also has access to your internal network. The XP firewall won't protect you if somebody can login as a guest for example. The firewall in the router will do nothing - it works only on the internet port.