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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

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as Internet connections and centralized databases. Infrastructure networks are

created to support small office/home office (SOHO) networks, and the access

points in these environments are known as SOHO WAPs and SOHO routers.

EXAM TIP Many manufacturers produce devices for a type of hybrid

wireless topology, where most of the nodes connect in a mesh network, but

that also includes some wired machines as well. The key characteristic of a

wireless mesh network (WMN) is that the nodes act like routers, forwarding

traffic for other nodes, but without the wires.

In practice, a WMN tends to be more static than a traditional ad hoc

network; that is, devices don’t tend to come in and out rapidly. Plus, they’ll

have a mix of wired nodes as well. WMNs are currently in use in specific

environments, such as interconnecting computers in deployed U.S. Army

field units and Google Home devices.

1002

Wireless Networking Security

One of the major complaints against wireless networking is that it offers

weak security, but the industry has made progress on this front in recent

years. After all, data packets are floating through the air instead of safely

wrapped up inside network cabling—what’s to stop an unscrupulous person

with the right equipment from grabbing those packets out of the air and

reading that data? In the past, you could access a wireless network by

walking into a WAP’s coverage area, turning on a wireless device, and

connecting. These days, it has grown hard to find accidentally open networks

as hardware makers have trended toward using some type of security by

default. Still, issues with these well-intentioned defaults are common, so it’s

still important to review the settings on new equipment.

Wireless networks use three methods to secure access to the network itself

and secure the data being transferred: MAC address filtering, authentication,

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