elefino wrote:
I've got my lan cables in little stick-on plastic channel running from 2nd floor to basement, and to several rooms. It's not utterly ugly, but it ain't pretty. I'm just not ready for the kind of poking, drilling and breakage that would be needed to hide the wires inside the walls. However, my wife was just wondering, out loud, how the existing cable runs will look to potential home-buyers if we put the house on the market this spring. Actually, she was asking in that tone that women reserve for phrases like: "You're not going to wear that shirt with those pants, are you?"
Neither one of us wants to be without net and internet for any length of time, so I've just started thinking about wireless lan. I've also read about war-driving and stealing residential wireless access and getting hapless owners in trouble with their ISPs for spamming and cracking done via hit-and-run pirated wireless. And I certainly don't want anybody downloading kiddy-pron through my ISP account.
So, is the current generation of wireless lan stuff (router/gateways and wireless nics, etc.) well protected, by default? I want to stick with DHCP and avoid static IP if I can -- I occasionally bring home different laptops from the office. I'm not supposed to monkey with extra profiles on the office machines, and they're all set up for DHCP. What's the mechanism that's used to ensure that somebody driving past my house can't grab a connection to my ISP if I deploy a wireless lan? Is exclusivity/ privacy based on MAC addresses or on certificate exchange? or.... what?
You'll want to use 128 bit WEP and change the keys occasionally.