Jan

3

Wireless Home

Posted by cameron

January 3, 2007 |

My home has been very traditional (aka old fashioned). A couple of landline phones, a den with a desktop computer, a television with antenna. But the wireless revolution has arrived at my home. It started with us switching to cellular phones and removing our landline. The event that enabled this for me was legislation allowing me to transfer my home phone number to my cell phone. That one thing made the transition seamless. I haven’t regretted it for one minute. All I had to do was tell my cell phone operator to do it. Within a couple of days it was complete and about a month later I received a rebate check from my local phone company. It couldn’t have been easier. Now I’m always available and I didn’t even have to memorize a new phone number and neither did anyone else.

At the same time I have been rethinking our computer strategy because our needs have changed. We need two computers in the house and they must be networked for peripheral and folder sharing. I wanted to be able to communicate easily with family overseas so I have added a HP media center notebook computer with built in wireless and web cam. I bought this for my wife’s Christmas gift. By using a Linksys Router I could remove my firewalls and enable inside the home sharing. My intention is to replace the desktop with a second notebook computer. The new 17” wide-screen notebooks make this an easy decision. The space saving and mobility are huge pluses and adding a wireless, optical mouse didn’t hurt either.

The next step is to start adding wireless peripheral nodes. The obvious nodes are printer, scanner etc. Less obvious is a wireless digital picture frame, wireless I-pod docking and programming station, wireless music centers etc. Wireless isn’t just freeing up the location of equipment but the location of me.

Network security is a huge issue. The problem has moved from having a firewall block a single point of entry, my Internet connection, to somehow blocking the airwaves where my internal wireless signal is. Since there is no way to block it I have encrypted it. There are choices about that when you install the network and the only way to go is WPA2. I’m referring you to an excellent article on this at GoPaulTech.com and yes; I will be having PaulTech test my system using Kismet. Results of the testing will follow later.


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