Recommended security setting

In my opinion, you should make every attempt to secure your wireless network. Even if you live in a quiet and remote area, your wireless signal, under the perfect circumstances, may travel far beyond your area. At the moment, you may not have any critical files on your pc, however, if you create and receive email, then you have critical information available to a would-be hacker and besides, you may inadvertently give out the names of all your email buddies as well as their email address. This could be a spammer's dream. Anyway, if you have WEP, WPA (radius) or WPA-PSK available to you, pick one and use it. It is preferred that you use WPA or WPA-PSK encryption. This will at least secure the traffic sent from your wireless device to the AP and vice-versa. MAC address filtering should also be available. It's not foolproof, but it is another layer of defense. I hope this information helps you. Take care.

Thanks, Doug, this is the information I was looking for. My WAG54G setup has WPA Pre-Shared Key, WPA RADIUS, RADIUS and WEP.

I assume a choice has to be made, then carefully set each computer to the same Wireless Security Mode. I tried this, but kept getting a total failure of the network. I guess I need to go back through the manual and re-read the setup instructions.

I think part of my problem may stem from the fact that Microsoft automatically makes some settings on two of the computers, but for some reason does not have any control on my desktop system.

This is what I just finished doing today on my Linksys Wireless B Router (BEFW11S4) using a DSL internet connection:

1. Change the default router password (my default was 'admin') to your own personal one.
2. Enable WEP (128 bit).
3. Use MAC filtering.
4. Change the default channel (usually 6) to something else....pick one! I switched to Channel 3.
5. Change the default SSID (mine was 'linksys') to like 'GordNetwork' or something like that.

The product support pages at

guide you on how to do these 5 things.

Regards,

Kevin

Hi Gordon. What OS are you using? Unless otherwise stated, I will assume it is windows xp. If I am correct, I suggest that you update xp to SP-2

then install the update to SP-2 The SP-2 update makes wireless networking with WPA and WPA-PSK encryption, using the windows wireless zero configuration utility, a breeze. Anyway, go to your router's configuration menu and locate the security settings. If you do not have a radius server to communicate with, then choose the WPA-PSK. The wording may be different. For instance, some router indicate WPA (radius) and WPA (non-radius). After selecting WPA-PSK, you might see TKIP and/or AES. These are ciphers. If you see AES, choose it because it is the most secure at this time. If not, TKIP will definitely suffice. Now create a long nonsense passphrase and type it where indicated.. For example:

bQ2hrTqo CjyOTYRUegSdKEl9QVmeKhZm4Ma0B2jwaGIRq1goarKxNPxjpmeru7.

Copy the passphrase because when you finish, you will have to enter it into your card's configuration menu or the windows zero configuration menu under WPA-PSK. Click apply or okay then exit the utility. Now pull up the card's utility or the windows wireless zero configuration utility. Basically, do the same as above. By the way, update the firmware of the card and router, if available prior to starting this procedure. Let me know how it turn out. Take care.

All good advice, but, if possible, use Wi-Fi Protected Access with a pre-shared key (WPA-PSK) instead of WEP. Check out this article on the latest WEP cracking tools for more information:

I just added a wireless network to my home network last night as well, and while my DI-524 wireless router and Windows XP SP2 on the laptop support WPA-PSK, the GemTek WL-350 mini PCI WLAN adapter *in* the laptop does not. So I'm using WEP too. Add to that that version 1.05 of the firmware on the DI-524 has mucked up MAC filtering (drops all wireless connections once it's turned on, no matter the MACs in the list), and I'm feeling a little exposed.