Surak's Journal: Networking my new apartment!

I'm moving into my new place in June. It's an apartment in an apartment complex. I've thought about going 802.11b rather than running wires throughout my apartment. What are some of the pros and cons of this?

I mean, for one thing, there's the whole security thing. OTOH, I will be running on a cablemodem thorugh Comcast (which is a whole security concern by itself), so maybe I'm making a big deal out of nothing. But I doubt it.

I plan on firewalling off the cablemodem connection (obviously) with a Devil Linux box. What about the wireless connection though? If people in my building can connect to the wireless hub, wouldn't they be *behind* my firewall? I guess it dependsd on how I set it up. I personally like to be a little more loose on security once inside the firewall but obviously this isn't going to work in apartment complex running a 802.11b hub.

Any ideas? :)

Apartment Networking

[mr.4square]

I've been running a WiFi network in my Apt. for nearly 7 months with no incidents of anything. I do use a firewall to protect myself from the outside world, I too am on a cable modem connection. My wireless network is secured using the 64 or 128 bit security. I think I set it at 128, but I'm not too sure. All my machines are wired excpet for my laptop which I wanted to use anywhere in the apt so I got the wireless card and ap for it. It dual boots both win 2k and linux and in both os's I've installed a

Re:Apartment Networking

[Surak]

So, that being said. I would think you should go for it. As long as you apply some security, your unprotected wireless neighbors would be a much better target than you.

These are probably the same morons on the cable modem network who hook up their unprotected Windows 98 with filesharing turned on and open to the world. ;)

Some inside information

[Big Nothing]

I can provide some "inside information" if you whish. I am just an amateur nerd, though - I don't work with WLAN or any of the sorts. All information should be labelled AFAIK. Anyway...

--------- My gear ----------

I run a WLAN at home, with components from D-Link. Specifically, I use the DWL-614+ gateway/router with 802.11b+ as a LAN Gateway and WLAN access point. I have 2 laptops with DWL-650+ PCMCIA WLAN cards. I also have a desktop puter, but I run that off wire at the moment. I didn't manage getting my

Re:Some inside information

[Surak]

Thanks for the info. I'll have to do some research to find out if the aforementioned wireless cards will work on Linux 2.4.x, though.