Monthly Archives: April 2007

A little over a week ago I changed my wireless setup at my home. I have allowed my neighbor to get on my wireless so we can share our connection however he was getting a really weak signal and sometimes none at all. His friend had told him to buy an airport express which can work as a repeater and can also stream his iTunes music to his stereo. We played with it and my Linksys router and did finally get it working correctly. However I decided to go ahead and try out an older Airport Extreme Base station for my wireless and see how it worked. Needless to say I am pretty happy with the results. The Airport even has a USB port for printer sharing, so I no longer need my desktop on to print anymore. After reading some wireless security articles online I decided it was also a good time to beef it up a bit. Before I was simply using mac filtering which I works well keeping off average Joe from getting on, but someone with any expereince could hack that pretty quickly. I decided to use WPA as well as mac filtering. I wanted to have a strong key so I found a website that generates random 63 alpha numeric key. I then setup all of our computers with the key and it worked great. Here is the website I used https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm It is supposed to never repeat a key ever again. Hopefully that is true. The setup has been working great and my neighbor now has full strength with his wireless. Now I just need to come up with a new SSID to get away from the default Apple one. The setup is really nice rather than using a webpage like most wireless routers, Apple has a program on the computer that runs. No need to remember the routers ip address that way and the option to extend the network with the Airport Express was right there too. It automatically configured it all for me.
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