2 wireless laptops from same router?

[scasparz]

Sell Overseas Property

tomkin am afraid not much will come by disabling SSID broadcasting. For packet sniffers are so easy to find these days...


cheers mate

[tomkin]

Sell Overseas Property

Hi Scasbarz

For the average user who wants to eliminate the risk of someone coming along with a wireless enabled laptop and trying to piggyback their wifi, good practice and the first line of defence is always to stop the router broadcasting the SSID

The second step is to use WPA and not WEP security. The advantage that WPA has over WEP (which was cracked in 60 seconds) are

1) Length of IV is now 48, comparing to WEP’s 24. This gives you over 500 trillion possible key combinations.

2) IV has much better protection with better encryption methods. This is prevention of reuse of IV keys.

3) Master keys are never directly used.

Support for WPA security encryption was introduced into Windows from XP service pack 2 onwards. Anyone still running service pack 1 or earlier versions of Windows should ideally upgrade

As for packet sniffers there are 2 types. Packet capture and packet interception. Packet capture requires that router security has been breached and interception does not. Interception is rather more specialist and represents the danger in airports and other public wifi areas which is why you should always protect your personal data and encrypt your traffic by using a VPN in these areas

Kind Regards
Tomkin

[GarryN]

Sell Overseas Property

In answer to the original question about 999 (or 998) can be connected simultaneously at the same (but don't expect fast connection!) if DHCP is turned on on the router. Only use use public WiFi briefly and if at home use Ethernet by preference and turn the wireless off. It's a complex subject but using a UNIX (or Mac) computer will stop most people, certainly if your computer is not on for days at a time. As people have said WPA2 is your best better and a complex wireless password should stop most people getting in, especially to the router. Open (unlocked) networks are quite hard to find these days (so I've been told!). Fortunately many services now have WiFi to pick up your email on route. What hasn't been mentioned is open WiFi which is intended only to access your computer and extract valuable information, EU Wifi from offical sourses is generally OK but powerful transmitters can swamp the official ones. At the end of the day there is only so much you can do but be brief and move on and use hard wired at home. This won't help those in Apartment with wireless only connections when perhaps the only option is encrypted VPN over the wireless.

Garry

[PCVrach]

Sell Overseas Property

You can connect a large number of laptops wirelessly (certainly more than home users will ever need), but each additional one will drop the speed as they share a limited bandwidth. At some stage if they are all in use the network will grind to a halt as the network becomes flooded with data.

If you use your laptop elsewhere you need (typically) the SSID and password (if one is set up and should ALWAYS be), using the laptop in a different place often tries to use these settings so some manual intervention is sometimes required to tell the laptop which network to connect to or which settings to use.

Some 3rd party connection software (not windows) requires other information like which channel to use (handy if your wireless is using the same one as next doors causing a conflict) which you can change.

As an IT engineer I agree with the security comments on here, but not using wireless over CAT 5 is a bit paranoid, if it is set up properly it is reasonably secure for home use.

Regards, David.

[gordonroy43]

Sell Overseas Property

Hi,

Agree with last post, hackers will get into the systems as it is not 100% safe like the ones who done this on government systems.

But as stated my router allows up to eight wireless laptops, but as stated above will slow down the more you connect.