Wireless Home Networking - Index of

Chapter 6: Installing Wireless Access Points in Windows
We talk about both types of WPA2 in much greater detail in Chapter 9.
WPA2 Enterprise is, frankly, overkill for the home environment and much
more difficult to set up. We recommend that you use WPA2 Personal
instead — it gets you 99 percent of the way there in terms of security
and is much easier to set up and configure.
� WEP keys: You should always use some security on your wireless network,
and if your network cannot support WPA, you should use, at minimum,
Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) encryption. Only a determined
hacker with the proper equipment and software can crack the key. If you
don’t use WEP or some other form of security, any nosy neighbor with a
laptop, wireless PC Card, and range-extender antenna may be able to see
and access your wireless home network. Whenever you use encryption,
all wireless stations in your house attached to the wireless home network
must use the same key. Sometimes the AP manufacturer assigns a
default WEP key. Always assign a new key to avoid a security breach.
Read Chapter 9 for great background info on WEP and WPA2.
� WPS: Wi-Fi Protected Security works with WPA2 and makes it considerably
easier to set up WPA2 security on your network by automating the
process. As we discuss in Chapter 9, you can implement WPS in two
ways:
• PIN code: You can turn on WPA2 by simply entering a PIN code
printed on your Wi-Fi hardware (usually on a label).
• Pushbutton: You can press a button on your Wi-Fi router (a physical
button or a virtual button on a screen on the router). When the
button is pushed, your devices can automatically connect to the
router and automatically configure WPA2 in 2 minutes. Simply push
the button(s) and let things set themselves up with no further
intervention.
� Username and password: Configuration software may require that you
enter a password to make changes to the AP setup. The manufacturer
may provide a default username and password (see the user documentation).
Use the default password when you first open the configuration
pages, and then immediately change the password to avoid a security
breach. (Note: This isn’t the same as the WPA2 shared key, which is also
called a password by some user interfaces.) Make sure that you use a
password you can remember and that you don’t have to write down.
Writing down a password is the same as putting a sign on the equipment
that says “Here’s how you hack into me.” If you ever lose the password,
you can always reset a device to its factory configuration and get back
to the point where you took it out of the box.
� MAC address: The Media Access Control (MAC) address is the physical
address of the radio in the AP. This number is printed on a label attached
to the device. You may need to know this value for troubleshooting, so
write it down. The AP’s Ethernet (RJ-45) connection to the wired network
also has a MAC address that’s different from the MAC address of the AP’s
radio.
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