I need to connect my wife's mac laptop to our cable Internet. I have a
pc at the modem. Maybe I'm a bit paranoid, but a wireless router
concerns me, even with encryption. So I'm looking at these, a Netgear
product (belkin, others also make them) that basically turns your house
wiring into an Ethernet LAN:
http://www.netgear.com/products/details/XE102.php A set of 2 (what I'd
need for a connection to my wife's laptop in her office) is about 100
bucks, adding a router takes the total to ~$150. Once set, the
"transmitter" is plugged in to a wall outlet at the router, then the
"receiver" can by plugged into any house electrical outlet & you have an
Ethernet jack (though presumably the outlets must be on eht same side of
the 120 line?) I do have a concern though regarding whether or not our
signal might be propagated over the local power grid to other homes in
the area. Also, the device operates at 4 to 20 mhz. I'm guessing at
these frequencies, house wiring is not a very effective radiator, but is
it possible the signals may be broadcast under the right conditions?

TIA

Dan

Do you know that you can use most wireless routers as wired routers
also?

I don't know of any wireless router that doesn't but I do have a
Netgear which have four wired ports. It comes out of the box with the
wireless capability disabled. To activate it, you have to go into its
settings by using a web browser from a connected PC.

wrote:
Do you know that you can use most wireless routers as wired routers
also?

I don't know of any wireless router that doesn't but I do have a
Netgear which have four wired ports. It comes out of the box with the
wireless capability disabled. To activate it, you have to go into its
settings by using a web browser from a connected PC.


No, I didn't know that, but it's a useful bit of information. I need to
get a router in any case, and this way my options would be open. Do you
recommend any particular make/model? I have 8 meg cable internet.

Thanks for the reply!

Dan

Dan wrote:
I need to connect my wife's mac laptop to our cable Internet. I have a
pc at the modem. Maybe I'm a bit paranoid, but a wireless router
concerns me, even with encryption. So I'm looking at these, a Netgear
product (belkin, others also make them) that basically turns your house
wiring into an Ethernet LAN:
http://www.netgear.com/products/details/XE102.php A set of 2 (what I'd
need for a connection to my wife's laptop in her office) is about 100
bucks, adding a router takes the total to ~$150. Once set, the
"transmitter" is plugged in to a wall outlet at the router, then the
"receiver" can by plugged into any house electrical outlet & you have an
Ethernet jack (though presumably the outlets must be on eht same side of
the 120 line?) I do have a concern though regarding whether or not our
signal might be propagated over the local power grid to other homes in
the area. Also, the device operates at 4 to 20 mhz. I'm guessing at
these frequencies, house wiring is not a very effective radiator, but is
it possible the signals may be broadcast under the right conditions?

TIA

Dan

Ugh! I don't know about you, but trying to get a 20 MHz signal cleanly
propagated around my house using the 110 V wiring would scare the hell
out of me. Not that I think it would be fire hazard or anything like
that...I'd just be skeptical of it working right out of the box.
Having dabbled in X-10 a bit, and seeing how ordinary,
otherwise-innocuous-seeming appliances can destroy X-10 signals (which,
I believe, are at a frequency much lower than the 4-20 MHz range...does
that make them easier or harder to deal with in this situation?), I'd
be very impressed if this stuff worked right out of the box in all
situations. My own experience is that most of the larger appliances
in my home always seemed to have some sort of internal AC filter or
surge suppressor or some kind of other protection device, which goes
unnoticed as far as normal 110VAC is concerned, but screws up other
signals in a big way. I've had to purchased an X-10 signal indicator
for troubleshooting, various X-10 filters, repeaters, etc., just to get
a few lights to turn on and off with an acceptable level of
reliability. Way over the cost of the devices themselves, I should
add. Running a modulated Ethernet in this same environment sounds
hairy.

Definitely do some research on this one...and let us know how you make
out!






Using existing wiring for Ethernet is a tempting choice...but I'd try
to find out more about how it will play with existing stuff plugged
into outlets

On 2/1/06 8:22 AM, in article ,
"Dan" wrote:

I need to connect my wife's mac laptop to our cable Internet. I have a
pc at the modem. Maybe I'm a bit paranoid, but a wireless router
concerns me, even with encryption.

I agree, you are paranoid. I have two PCs (both wireless) and two Macs (1
wireless and 1 Ethernet) served by a wireless router with 64 bit encryption,
and don't have any problems, nor do I expect any. I'm using an Airport
Extreme, which makes it simple for all to share a USB printer located near
the base station. Wireless would permit your wife to be just about
anywhere in your house or outside with the laptop, without dragging a cable.

Don

So I'm looking at these, a Netgear
product (belkin, others also make them) that basically turns your house
wiring into an Ethernet LAN:
http://www.netgear.com/products/details/XE102.php A set of 2 (what I'd
need for a connection to my wife's laptop in her office) is about 100
bucks, adding a router takes the total to ~$150. Once set, the
"transmitter" is plugged in to a wall outlet at the router, then the
"receiver" can by plugged into any house electrical outlet & you have an
Ethernet jack (though presumably the outlets must be on eht same side of
the 120 line?) I do have a concern though regarding whether or not our
signal might be propagated over the local power grid to other homes in
the area. Also, the device operates at 4 to 20 mhz. I'm guessing at
these frequencies, house wiring is not a very effective radiator, but is
it possible the signals may be broadcast under the right conditions?

TIA

Dan

Don Bowey spake thus:

On 2/1/06 8:22 AM, in article ,
"Dan" wrote:

I need to connect my wife's mac laptop to our cable Internet. I
have a pc at the modem. Maybe I'm a bit paranoid, but a wireless
router concerns me, even with encryption.

I agree, you are paranoid. I have two PCs (both wireless) and two
Macs (1 wireless and 1 Ethernet) served by a wireless router with 64
bit encryption, and don't have any problems, nor do I expect any. I'm
using an Airport Extreme, which makes it simple for all to share a
USB printer located near the base station. Wireless would permit your
wife to be just about anywhere in your house or outside with the
laptop, without dragging a cable.

So just how hard is it for a determined hacker to get past those
barriers? Anyone know for sure (no speculation, pleeze)?


--
The only reason corrupt Republicans rule the roost in Washington
is because the corrupt Democrats can't muster any viable opposition.

David Nebenzahl wrote:
So just how hard is it for a determined hacker to get past those
barriers? Anyone know for sure (no speculation, pleeze)?

The alternative is his device which is a one man BPL disaster. He's going
to wipe out HF communication around his home.

As for a determined hacker, there is no way to lock them out. Eventually
they will hack into your system. If you use decent passwords it will be
more difficult. Unless they live next door, they won't be able to crack
your network in the time they have before the police notice them.

Even 64 bit encryption is enough, because the current state of wireless is
that most people leave their SSIDs (network id) as "default" or "undefined"
(whatever the router comes with) and don't use encryption at all.

They can just drive a few feet and be able to send spam or download
porn without any hacking at all, so they'll just drive on.

Geoff.
--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel N3OWJ/4X1GM
IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667 IL Fax: 972-2-648-1443 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838
Visit my 'blog at http://geoffstechno.livejournal.com/

I agree, you are paranoid.

Heh, heh. I suppose so...

Dan wrote:
I need to connect my wife's mac laptop to our cable Internet. I have a
pc at the modem. Maybe I'm a bit paranoid, but a wireless router
concerns me, even with encryption. So I'm looking at these, a Netgear
product (belkin, others also make them) that basically turns your house
wiring into an Ethernet LAN:
http://www.netgear.com/products/details/XE102.php A set of 2 (what I'd
need for a connection to my wife's laptop in her office) is about 100
bucks, adding a router takes the total to ~$150. Once set, the
"transmitter" is plugged in to a wall outlet at the router, then the
"receiver" can by plugged into any house electrical outlet & you have an
Ethernet jack (though presumably the outlets must be on eht same side of
the 120 line?) I do have a concern though regarding whether or not our
signal might be propagated over the local power grid to other homes in
the area. Also, the device operates at 4 to 20 mhz. I'm guessing at
these frequencies, house wiring is not a very effective radiator, but is
it possible the signals may be broadcast under the right conditions?

TIA

Dan


I haven't tried those but they may well not be any more secure than a
wireless setup.

What you can do though is place the wireless portion on a different
subnet which gives you one more line of defense. There's custom
firmwares available for popular hacker-friendly routers like the Linksys
WRT-54GS which allow you to do this, or you could use an IP-Cop or
Smoothwall based PC router and plug a wireless router into the DMZ port.

Don Bowey wrote:
On 2/1/06 8:22 AM, in article ,
"Dan" wrote:


I need to connect my wife's mac laptop to our cable Internet. I have a
pc at the modem. Maybe I'm a bit paranoid, but a wireless router
concerns me, even with encryption.


I agree, you are paranoid. I have two PCs (both wireless) and two Macs (1
wireless and 1 Ethernet) served by a wireless router with 64 bit encryption,
and don't have any problems, nor do I expect any. I'm using an Airport
Extreme, which makes it simple for all to share a USB printer located near
the base station. Wireless would permit your wife to be just about
anywhere in your house or outside with the laptop, without dragging a cable.

Don



It doesn't hurt to be a little paranoid. A while back I was running 64
bit WEP encryption and just for fun I downloaded a few freely available
script-kiddie type hacking tools and was able to break into my network
in about 20 minutes. Now I run 128 bit WEP along with MAC adress
filtering and it's quite a bit more secure. At any given time I can
usually see 2-3 other wireless networks from my house, amazingly about
half of them have no encryption at all.

David Nebenzahl wrote:
Don Bowey spake thus:

On 2/1/06 8:22 AM, in article
,
"Dan" wrote:

I need to connect my wife's mac laptop to our cable Internet. I
have a pc at the modem. Maybe I'm a bit paranoid, but a wireless
router concerns me, even with encryption.


I agree, you are paranoid. I have two PCs (both wireless) and two Macs
(1 wireless and 1 Ethernet) served by a wireless router with 64 bit
encryption, and don't have any problems, nor do I expect any. I'm
using an Airport Extreme, which makes it simple for all to share a
USB printer located near the base station. Wireless would permit your
wife to be just about anywhere in your house or outside with the
laptop, without dragging a cable.


So just how hard is it for a determined hacker to get past those
barriers? Anyone know for sure (no speculation, pleeze)?




As I stated in another post, pretty easy.

Use 128 bit encryption, enable MAC filtering, and turn *off* SSID
broadcast on the router, that will make it very unlikely for someone to
stumble upon your network, though you will have to manually supply the
SSID and the key to each client machine you use and the MAC address of
each client to the router.

"Dan" wrote in message
. ..
I need to connect my wife's mac laptop to our cable Internet. I have a pc
at the modem. Maybe I'm a bit paranoid, but a wireless router concerns me,
even with encryption. So I'm looking at these, a Netgear product (belkin,
others also make them) that basically turns your house wiring into an
Ethernet LAN: http://www.netgear.com/products/details/XE102.php A set of 2
(what I'd need for a connection to my wife's laptop in her office) is about
100 bucks, adding a router takes the total to ~$150. Once set, the
"transmitter" is plugged in to a wall outlet at the router, then the
"receiver" can by plugged into any house electrical outlet & you have an
Ethernet jack (though presumably the outlets must be on eht same side of
the 120 line?) I do have a concern though regarding whether or not our
signal might be propagated over the local power grid to other homes in the
area. Also, the device operates at 4 to 20 mhz. I'm guessing at these
frequencies, house wiring is not a very effective radiator, but is it
possible the signals may be broadcast under the right conditions?

TIA

Dan

The newer and preferred protocol is WPA-PSK encryption. With this much
stronger encryption, the key is rotated at user-defined intervals, so even
in the unlikely event someone hacked your network, they couldn't use it for
longer than your rekey interval before they'd have to figure out the new
key, ad infinitum:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/u..._03july28.mspx

Broadband hijackers don't enjoy being cut off frequently, so they'll look
for less secure setups.

You can and should use MAC address filtering. But this isn't perfect, as
MAC's can be forged:

http://www.techexams.net/technotes/s...spoofing.shtml