I’ve heard rumors of how the 802.11 pre-n wireless networking hardware really KILLS nearby 802.11 wireless b/g networks. Today George Ou has some details. I really think this is a serious problem with the equipment coming out as it will force people to move to another wireless standard. (Somehow, this is all starting to make sense now – wait – maybe it ISN’T a problem “from a certain point of view”.) Anyway – it sounds like it’s really problematic to troubleshoot because it only kills the other networks when transmitting, so symptoms of the problem would be sporadic network drops. (Ouch wireless is going to be getting tricker ESPECIALLY in high density areas.)
Tag: wireless
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What a week….
I think it’s time to pass along a long story of what’s gone on over the last week or so here and some of the reasons there hasn’t been anything posted. Generally, I would say that work has been busy, but something happened last week that went a bit beyond the day to day and there might be some items worth considering. The short story is my internet access was suspended and I’ve been only connected to the internet for 30 minutes or so at a time to retrieve mail and spent dozens of hours reviewing system logs…. but the long story is needed to sort out what has happened. I’m not going to break this up into multiple posts, but I may pull out some details for seperate posts at some point.
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Network Security – Arp spoofing series
I think I’ve wrapped up the series on arp spoofing and it’s implications for network security. I know there’s nothing earth shattering here, most network security types are well aware of the problems (and perhaps aware of more sophisticated solutions?). For some though, this series is likely an eye opener as there are myths that switches cannot be sniffed, that ONLY wireless data packets can be sniffed, etc. etc.
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Network Security – how should an open wireless access point be run beside a safe network?
So, let’s say we want to have an open wireless access point for some reason. (Maybe offering it to guests if you’re a business?) There are certainly a lot of BAD ways to give open wireless access. As we’ve seen in this series so far, it could be quite easy to hijack all connections in a network using arp spoofing. If you run business machines on a network you do NOT by any means want an open access point on the same subnet. Here are some possibilities though…..
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Network security – what does arp spoofing mean for wireless?
So, if you haven’t already had enough cause to tighten your wireless security…. we’ve been talking about arp poisoning (spoofing) and the basic conclusion is that IF an attacking machine is on the same subnet as your machine (same IP address range), they can “own” all traffic from you machine to the gateway. It doesn’t matter if you’re using wireless or wired for your machine. As a demonstration I connected my laptop to my wireless access point…..
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Network security – how safe is your network? Looking at ARP
A while back I did a network security series and one of the points that I mentioned was that it’s important to know what is normal for your network. In other words, what machines are NORMALLY connected, what services are normally running, etc. Well, I’m about to start a serious look at something that makes this knowledge essential and that may have some rethinking whether or not it’s wise to run an open wireless access point on the same network as their traditional LAN.
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Your own wikipedia….
I’ve made quite a bit of use out of the wikipedia in recent years. I know it has it’s flaws (I’ve run across some first hand), but I’ve found typos in textbooks as well. However that doesn’t mean that it can’t be a very useful reference. In fact, in some of my browsing I’ve gone through the spanish language version of the wikipedia putting some of my spanish reading skills to the test. Anyway, in the last couple days I became curious for various reasons about actually downloading a copy and installing the wikipedia locally. Now, I know one of the benefits of the wikipedia is that it’s collaborative and this way I’ll miss out on current and changing/improving/updating articles. But I can see some reasons to want to have a “snapshot”.
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Using ssh to protect web browsing over wireless or other hostile networks
This really could be used to encyrpt web traffic over any “hostile” network. Here’s what I’m talking about. Laptop using wireless. Within our internal network we would LIKE all our web traffic to be encrypted at least from the laptop to a wired host. (From there to the outside world it will be open.) At the minimum we would like to have the traffic encrypted over the wireless leg of the journey. Here’s the most straightforward approaches uing ssh.
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Upgrade your mouse
This is going in the basics category. Quite often I visit a computer that has a mouse which is just a trial of patience to use. I mean, you have to pick it up and move it, shake it a bit, turn it over and clean out the lint from the “ball” area…. The good news is that mousing does NOT have to be like this. If your computer has a PS2 (small round plug) for your mouse, or a USB (small rectangular plug) for your mouse, it should be VERY easy to replace that old ball style mouse with an optical mouse.
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OpenVPN
The last time I used openvpn, it was version 1.x and only supported a single connection per running process. So, if you had a server that you wanted to support multiple clients connecting, you had to… have multiple ports open to the outside world (unless you did something VERY fancy), and had to have as many openvpn processes open and listening for connections, as you had clients you expected to connect. It wasn’t a pretty setup unless you had a small number (1-5) that you expected to connect. Fortunately that has changed with the 2.0 series of openvpn and it’s really matured as a vpn solution.