how to see all pc's on my wireless

Your router will probably have a page that lists current connections. You /do/ have anti-virus installed AND uptodate, don't you...?

Chris

Hey "Miso". If you have questions or comments, please send them from a working email address. Thanks.

Freaking Thunderbird. I could of sworn reply went to the group. I see how you need to hit "followup". This was a working email addesss at one time. I sometimes use it from google groups on machines where I don't have a mail client installed.

My comment was airsnare sounds no more secure than mac filtering.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Switch to Forte Agent.

Here's your comment:

Right. However, Airsnare detects any unauthorized MAC address. If someone spoofs a normal user, than it won't sound the alarm. However, if someone just randomly starts changing their MAC address, it will alert the owner that someone's trying to break in.

It's called "AP Isolation". An intruder can only get to the internet and not to any of the PC's on the LAN.

The AP isolation as I read it keeps wireless clients from sniffing other wireless clients. To keep the wireless client off your system, you need to "unbridge" it. I haven't got that part working. It looks more complicated than the menu would indicate. Reading the DD-WRT manual, you need to set up a virtual access point. This is on my list.

Back to airsnare, you could get the MAC address via kismet, so no change of MAC would be detected. But kismet has a feature where it can detect spoofing by seeing the same MAC have different signal levels within a given period of time. The idea being a MAC in your house and the same MAC by an outside intruder. Even then the intruder could crank up the juice to match your signal.

I think keeping the wireless units off of your wired lan is the best bet. If you need to transfer data, just use a thumb drive or temporarily hook up the devices on the wired router.

Yes I have AV and all updates I used the settings away from the cd and made it so there can be only one wifi connection and the SSID is now invisable with a new key. What is the advantages of using WPA and WPA2 - WPA2 on mine has WPA2-PSK and WPA2-Enterprise which one should I use, I only use the WiFi for my Playstation 3 and I am about to buy a Playstation Vita so I will bump up the max WiFi connections to 2. I hear that using a switch is good but I have no understanding of them would I have to plug my ethernet cable into the PC and then to the switch and the switch into my wireless modum? Will the switch work for the wireless too? I have a button on my modum/wireless to enable WPS but im using a key and I dont think the PS3 has WPS enabled or avaliable, should I continue using the key or try to get the WPS working?

wow many questions, thanks all

GK

No point making the SSID invisible. It's still discoverable (but harder) and just irritates other people around you trying to find a clear channel.

WPA2-PSK is good for a home-based setup.

The switch is like an outlet multiplier for your mains electricity, but it's for networking. Typically a home/consumer-grade switch will have four (or maybe eight) ports on it. Each port is directly equivalent to any other - you can imagine that there's a set of wires connecting port to evry other. You plug one device into each port - including the AP and Router.

If you don't think the PS3 will work with WPS, don't use WPS. Continue using the key. (WPS is for people who can't/won't enter a key.)

Chris

I recall WPS is compromised, i.e. it can be hacked.

I didn't quite follow if a switch was being added to a router or not. By some magic, at least with this Dlink I have, you can put the switch on the router and the DHCP knows how to assign IP address to what is on the switch. What you do have to keep in mind is that one port on the router is now shared with all the clients on the switch, so the bandwidth could be reduced to those clients if they are all busy. If you had a device that you wanted to have minimal ping time or the best streaming, you would use a port on the router.

The switch is an un-necessary confusion in your description. When a device (your PC, your mobile phone, Wii, whatever) wants an IP address it shouts across the wire (or wireless) for one. In your case the Router is responsible for allocating these IP addresses so it gives one out. The switch itself will not have an IP address and will not know anything about IP addresses.

Like I said last time (or tried to say), consider it simply as a device for plugging cables together.

Router ----[ ] AP --------[ ] Device 1 --[ SWITCH ] Device 2 --[ ] Device 3 --[ ]

Technically true, but unless you're maxing out 100Mbit ethernet you're unlikely to see this as a problem.

best streaming, you would use a port on the router.

Er, no, not really. See above. Chris

The switch must have some measurable latency and certainly an effect on BW if the clients on the switch are busy. So I stand by that statement unless you can explain otherwise.

While it wouldn't be hard to set up a theoretical test case that supports the argument of the single-port bottleneck, I think it would be unusual to see it in practice. It depends on things like a real definition for "busy", and careful consideration of the two endpoints of this so-called 'busy' conversation. BW considerations, where one endpoint is on the Internet, must also take into account the fact that most of us don't have a 100 Mbps (let alone 1000 Mbps) Internet WAN connection, so the test would have to be heavily favored toward LAN traffic, and would also have to be engineered in such a way as to saturate the link between the switches, rather than exist as intraswitch traffic on either switch A or switch B.

I've run tests to see what a cheap ethernet switch can handle. The common problem is that two ports are occupied by a high bandwidth application, such as running a backup or massive file copies, while users on the other ports are trying to surf the web. The basic setup requires 4 computers and at least a 4 port switch. I run iPerf or preferably jPerf between two computers on two pairs of ports.

I don't have numbers handy, but I'll do this from memory. The performance really varied with different switches and routers, especially at gigabit speeds. At 100baseT-FDX (full duplex), the average router would deliver 80Mbits/sec on a single pair of ports and

However, I found a few ancient bus type ethernet 5 port switches (Dlink something) that split the bandwidth in half when run on two pairs of ports. That sucks but fortunately is not very common.

Things got really messy with gigabit. With a typical 5 port 1000baseT switch, I could usually get about 800Mbits/sec thruput for a single pair of ports, but only after considerable optimization (tweaking) of packet sizes, window sizes, and such. (The stock Windoze XP system barely delivered 300Mbits/sec). However, when I ran two pairs of ports, the results were all over the map. Some switches cut the bandwidth in half, others only dropped a little. A rather expensive

Adding an external gigabit switch to the router makes things worse. With two pairs of streams running through one port on the external switch and through the switch on the router, it's going to bottleneck at half the speed of each stream. The simple solution is to buy an external switch which has enough ports to handle all the wired connections, and run exactly one cable to the wireless router, which is unlikely to run at gigabit rates.

.Conversely, couldn't you put the clients that you want to have bandwidth on the wifi/router, saving one port from the wifi/router feeding the switch, then put printers and nodes where you don't care about speed on that switch.

I will admit your solution is simpler, but 8 port switches are about all you can find for cheap, so the extra ethernet ports on the wifi/router will be needed.

Say you have 4 ports on the wifi router and 8 ports on the switch, Just hooking them together means you have 3 + 7 ports available. I have a lot of thin clients that really don't need the speed, so putting them on the switch makes sense for my case.

If all the clients were as demanding, then putting them all on the switch makes a lot of sense. If you have a few thin clients that aren't speedy, doesn't it make more sense to take the slow pokes, put them on a switch, and then create a higher bandwidth stream by summing them all together, and have that feed off the wifi/router.