Help with wireless kit selection

My gf's dad has just bought a D-Link DSL-904 wireless router and wireless USB adapter set. A great bit of kit for the price. After seeing it I'm gonna buy one tomorrow.

You can get it from Ebuyer for £67.67 inc vat and standard delivery @

At the moment PC World are doing it in-store for £69.99 but only until tomorrow, and only if you take along the advert (or voucher as thy call it) thats been in the papers.

Russell

How well is this likely to work over a distance of 100 metres?

[snip] Depending on the walls etc, 100m is quite some distance for simple off-the-shelf kit. However if both ends of the link have aerials connected by screw-in connectors (I want to say D-connectors but that may not be the correct name), then you can buy better, directional aerials that will increase your range.

FYI, 30 miles (sic) is possible with the correct kit, good parabolic dishes etc. but you'll just need something a little less impressive. Of course you won't be able to connect "behind" the antenna, but providing you want a straight line-of-site connection, you'll be sorted.

OTOH, exterior grade CAT.5 cable is relatively cheap so perhaps you might want to consider a long cable between the two buildings - providing it's all over you land of course.

Paul DS.

Not very.

If you have the router in a room next to the outside wall in one building, and the PC with the adapter in a room next to the facing outside wall in the other building, and there are no trees or other obstructions in between, then it will probably work when the weather is fine.

According to the manual , it has a range of up to 100M indoors, 300M outdoors, but that 300M means with *nothing* between them, and is the absolute maximum you can expect in perfect conditions.

Neither the router nor the adapter appear to have detachable antennae, so it might not be easy to replace with better ones.

This router also appears to be one of the least secure you can buy :-( It does not have an SPI firewall (in spite of what I said a few minutes ago in another thread), and although it has 128-bit WEP or WPA encryption, it cannot hide SSID, so anybody nearby with a wireless enabled device can tell that you have a network.

Alex Heney wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

The DSL-G604T has a Reverse SMA antenna connector. It is supplied with a stock 2dBi antenna, but you can fit a higher gain antenna as required.

Yes it does, although it it not particularly visible from the (IMO) very confused web-based config. The device is based on the TI AR7 communications processor running MontaVista Linux + Busybox, the same as the Netgear DG834G.

Yes, it can disable SSID broadcast.

You are indeed correct that "anybody nearby ... can tell that you have a network". This is of course true of *any* access point, whether or not there is a facility (attempt?) to disable SSID broadcast since the SSID is *always* transmitted in certain frames. The SSID is intended to be broadcast, and 'hiding' it is (a) impossible (b) not a security measure. This topic has been discussed at length in this and other forums. But if it makes you feel better, go ahead...

The DSL-G604T is no less secure than any other device with WPA and WPA-PSK using RC4 encryption. The TI AR7 has hardware support for AES encryption, and I believe that a firmware upgrade to support this function is due. But D-Link is not always known for the speed of its firmware releases...

Kind regards

"Tiscali Tim" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@individual.net:

Unlikely without some assistance. Whatever router you buy, the likely best solution for the wireless link between the two buildings is a wireless bridge, using a mating pair of multi-mode access points configured in Brisge mode. To cover this distance you will likely need to use directional antennae at each end, positioned in line-of- sight. If you like D-Link kit, the DWL-2100AP will work just fine.

However, you may get lucky if you have line-of-sight between two windows. Place a wireless router in one window, and a multi-mode access point configured in Wireless Client mode in the other window. It may work without higher gain antennae, but medium gain directional panel antennae are not too expensive...

If you do set up a wireless bridge with a pair of devices using replacement antennae, you are likely to exceed your budget unless you buy on eBay...

Hope this helps

You obviously know the machine better than I do, since I have never seen or attempted to configure one, only read the manual.

But I'm surprised the manual makes no mention of it, and only mentions being able to turn on/off the firewall and NAT together.

Again, not according to the manual. Who writes these things?

Not quite true. When I said Anybody with a wireless enabled device, that is what I meant.

To be able to see it with SSID disabled, you need more than just "any" wireless device. You either need to know the SSID, or you need to have a device specifically set up to look for the "hidden" SSIDs.

I agree that it doesn't provide much protection at all against a "serious" hacker. But it stops the opportunists from seeing the network and just trying things to see if they can get in.

And it would appear not for the quality of its manuals :-(

Alex Heney wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

At best, it provides 'security by obscurity'. And the only reason it provides even that trivial protection is that the tools (together with the correct wireless card drivers) which run under Windows to reveal 'hidden' SSIDs are not widely distributed. If they were, you can bet that this so-called 'security' feature would rapidly be dismissed as the myth that it is.

Indeed. IMNSHO they are best described by the acrynym: PoS

Kind regards

PS: You're a long way from UKLM and UKL ?

There are too many manufacturers who seem to do user guides as an afterthought. Don't they realise that it will put people off using their equipment if the user cannot easily find out how to do things with it?

I currently have 22 groups in my main subscribed list. Where I'm most active varies over time :-)