More wi-fi fun — change those default SSIDs!

Posted on February 18, 2006 One Comment

We recently replaced a Wireless Access Point (WAP) at the office with a new one as it had seemed a bit unstable (to appreciate the irony of this, see yesterday’s mini rant… doh…). Maybe we just have too much interference in that server room for soho grade appliances?

Anyways, I snagged the old WAP and dragged it home to “see if it still works.” And, I have to confess, I’ve been realizing for several years now that my trusty ol’ Netgear ME102 access point is a bit… primitive, shall we say? Heck, I had to update it a few years back just to get longer than 40bit WEP keys and really, even that was of limited value as far as security goes. I know my neighbors have enjoyed practicing with the sniffers/crackers on me. *sigh*

I reset the “new” one to factory defaults this morning and begain the configuration exercise. But, I about went nuts right away — for almost an hour I wrestled with this thing! Everytime I’d either disable/enable my adapter or power cycle the WAP I’d get a great signal, but after about 15 - 60 seconds it’d degrade to around 10% and stop responding. Well, that’s just awkward when in the midst of the configuration bits. I’m ashamed to admit that it took almost an hour to realize that some other knucklehead in my neighborhood had the same SSID… well crap, I usually change that last and hadn’t even thought of that! Once I changed it then life got a lot easier for the rest of the setup.

Geeks unite - help our geek challenged brethren! If they must broadcast their ssid, we need to be obligated to help them change the name! Right now I see a “Linksys”, a “Belkin54g” and an “Actiontec” from my home office (and a few others that have nice names, but no encryption!).

So now it is up and going and working well. I’m digging the “g” aspects too — more speed is more better. I check the support site, see there’s an updated bios and flash it. That goes well too and opens up some nice new options. Cool beans.

Head downstairs to configure the daughter’s machine to use the new WAP. Uh oh… although she’s running XP sp2, WPA is not an option in her wifi settings. Only WEP. Aw man, ok. I ponder that for a minute then recall that I posted about a little util from McAfee that might help. Part of their Wireless Security package. I knew this blog would come in handy some day! Amusingly, I can’t find the post about it (lol!) but I found where I heard about it at grc.com for what that’s worth. Ok, so I knew that listening to Security Now would pay off some day!

Except it didn’t work. After the install the McAfee thing assured me that the daughter’s wifi card was just too old. Gee, it can’t be more than 5 years old! ok, so maybe it is time to retire the mighty Cisco Aironet 340 series cards? I had an old linksys WPC11 laying around for some reason (man, I hope I just replaced it and it works all the time) and that, combined with current drivers, got everything working for the girly’s machine too.

I’m two hours older, and a bit grayer, but feel like I’m a bit more secure and faster. But dang folks, change those SSIDs!

Tags: mcafee, security, wifi