Ive got a wireless router that I use for broadband with my home laptop. The router is in a cupboard under the stairs and I get good reception all over the house.
When I bring my work laptop home I use the same wireless network card so I can work with the laptop in the study.
Trouble is our IT department has spotted the drivers for the wireless card and made me remove them (spoil sports!)
All is not lost as my broadband router accepts an eithernet cable and works fine like this, but means I have to work in the sitting room which is less than ideal.
I would like to run an eithernet cable up from the router to the study, but wondered how long this sort of cable can be?
If it cant be more than a few meters then ill have to extend the phone line and relocate the router, but id rather not do this.
100 meters is the maximum distance to meet full spec. Ethernet will go some further as well, with diminished speed, provided it's good cable, and half way decent gear.
Yep. I have lots of fun putting connectors on the ends of a 1000ft roll of CAT5 and demonstrating to the non-believers that it works just fine. That catch is that it only works well at 10mbits/sec but not at
100mbits/sec. If you're going to play line stretcher, do it at 10 not
100.
The limiting factor is what's called NEXT or near end crosstalk, which rips on the signal to noise ratio. 11dB is the minimum and 1000ft just barely can do that with 10baseTX-HDX (half-duplex). Anyway, I have a 900ft run of CAT5 at a customers that's been working for about
3 years without much difficulties (except where the mice chewed through it).
Perhaps you want a "game adapter". These are sold to connect your X-box, et al, wirelessly to the network, but it should work for your laptop because it uses the drivers that you already have for the etherenet port. Linksys WGA54G is one. Netgear WGE111 is another.
I disagree. Windows usually gets a bad name because people find it unstable etc. The *only* thing that causes a blue screen kernel stop is kernel mode code, i.e. things like drivers. People get a fresh XP and then start loading on all kinds of code from various origins and then complain when one of them barfs and brings down the OS.
To help combat this, Microsoft introduced the concept of signed drivers, ones that had been through WHQL (lab testing) and thus had passed validation. If the policy (either hard or soft) is to only run signed drivers then so be it and it doesn't help the IT department one bit when people load on unknown unsupported drivers.
From a security point of view this also raises alerts. Lets assume that the IT department are doing rather well in locking down and securing the network. Then in comes Joe Bloggs, loads up some drivers for the inbuilt wireless card and creates an ad-hoc network with no encryption. All Joe Hacker has to do now is sit in the car park with a high gain antenna and target that nice corp laptop with the open wireless connection. Makes that rather expensive firewall with annual maintenance contract and trained staff to administer it all rather pointless!
If the company has a "no wireless" policy then that should be both accepted by staff and enforced by the company by using monitoring tools and appropriate countermeasures.
FWIW, I don't agree with a no wireless policy because way too often it's not enforced and just dealt with by publishing it on a piece of paper or an intranet and that just doesn't stop staff members plugging in the occassional AP now and again. Better to have a wireless policy and control it effectively. Prime example, I was talking to a non techy at a trade show yesterday, he said "we aren't allowed wireless but it's just so much easier, I just bring in an access point and use it in the meeting rooms when I need to". So if anyone wants to hack into one of the worldwide manufacturers of copiers and digital cameras, there you go.
Easy to do. Our systems have some helpful little tool that reports the version level of all drivers and certain applications. If your PC is downrev on anything, a new version is pushed down for you.
Occasionally there's a little popup asking you to reboot because of a new load.
Or maybe he left his WiFi card enabled and they have a policy against wireless in the building. He didn't say how they noticed that the drivers were detected.
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