Discount Computers

The following are the items most often at risk.

* Thieves can steal your sensitive personal and business data.
* Harmful viruses and worms can infiltrate your network, even
evading your anti-virus software. * Hackers can hijack your
Wi-Fi to spam or attack others – and you could be liable.

If you don’t want your network to fall victim to snooping or
people ‘borrowing’ your bandwidth, then you’re going to need to
lock down your network. Luckily for you, all wireless technology
has encryption built in — it’s just a matter of turning it on.

WEP Vs. WPA

Security on wireless networks does have a flaw, though — there
are two completely incompatible standards, which makes it a pain
to set up a whole network to use encryption.

How did this happen? Well, WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) was
the original standard for encryption over 802.11 wireless
networks. Back in 2001, though, a research paper was published
called ‘Weaknesses in the Key Scheduling Algorithm of RC4′. This
paper demonstrated critical flaws in the security of WEP that
made it trivial for someone to break into, if they wanted to.

Essentially, it is too easy to discover the secret ‘key’ used
for WEP, and once you have the key, you can get into the network
and stay in for as long as you want. People quickly recognised
that it was almost useless to use WEP on their network — but by
the time its weaknesses were discovered, the WEP method was
built into almost every piece of wireless equipment out there.

The WEP standard had to be replaced, and in 2003 WPA (Wi-Fi
Protected Access) was introduced as its replacement, fixing most
of its flaws. WPA is much more secure than WEP. Unfortunately,
though, WPA took a long time to reach the market, and WPA
devices were expensive when they were released. Combine this
with the fact that WEP is still the default in a lot of software
(because it’s supported by more devices), and you end up in the
confused situation we’re in today.

Always Use WPA

If you’re going to enable encryption, always use WPA. Devices
bought after 2003 or so should be compatible with it, as the
upgrade was made a mandatory part of the standard.

It is true that WEP is better than nothing — it will, at least,
deter the casual intruder, who won’t try any more than
double-clicking to get onto your network. WEP can also make you
less of a target for wardrivers, since there will be so many
completely open networks that they might as well use instead.
However, it’s silly to use WE nowadays when WPA is so easily
available.

Turning on Encryption

Turning on encryption in Windows isn’t too difficult, but it
does involve quite a lot of clicking — no wonder so few people
bother.

The first step is to turn on encryption for your wireless router
or access point. The exact method for this will vary between
devices, but you can usually do it by visiting the router or
access point’s configuration page in your web browser, finding
the encryption settings, and then choosing WPA. If you have any
trouble, refer to your manual.

Once you’ve done that, you need to change the encryption
settings on your computers. Open the ‘View Available Wireless
Networks’ screen by right-clicking on your wireless connection
in the bottom-right of the screen and choosing it from the menu
that appears. Then click ‘Change advanced settings’. Go to the
Wireless Networks section of this box, click your network’s
name, and then click Properties.

Now, where it says ‘Network authentication’, select WPA. Click
OK on everything you’ve opened. Once you’ve done that — this is
the really fun part — you’re going to have to do it for every
computer on your network!

It’s Easier for New Networks

While the process is quite troublesome for existing networks,
it’s much easier for ones that haven’t been set up yet. You’ll
still need to turn on encryption at the wireless router or
access point, but once you’ve done that you can set up
encryption as you set up the network using the Wireless Network
Setup Wizard.

Unfortunately (and stupidly) Windows now turns on WEP by default
when you set up your wireless network. This means that each time
you go through the wizard, you need to remember to tick the box
on the third screen that says ‘Use WPA encryption instead of
WEP’. Still, it’s easier than changing the settings manually
later on.

About the author:

Original Source: Articles-Galore.com

Information supplied and written by Lee Asher of CyberTech SoftShop

Suppliers of the DeadEasy
Ebook Maker and Publishing Wizard.

Wireless networks work using radio waves instead of wires to
transmit data between computers. That’s the simple version. The
big advantage of WiFi is its simplicity. You can connect
computers anywhere in your home or office without the need for
wires. The computers connect to the network using radio signals,
and computers can be up to 100 feet or so apart. If you’re
curious to know what’s going on in more detail, then read on,
it’s all explained in this article.

Ones and Zeros

I’m sure you know that computers transmit data digitally, using
binary: ones and zeros. This is a way of communicating that
translates very well to radio waves, since the computer can
transmit ones and zeros as different kinds of beep. These beeps
are so fast that they’re outside a human’s hearing range –
radio waves that you can’t hear are, in fact, all around you all
the time. That doesn’t stop a computer from using them, though.

Morse Code

The way it works is a lot like Morse code. You probably already
know that Morse code is a way of representing the alphabet so
that it can be transmitted over radio using a dot (short beep)
and a dash (long dash). It was used manually for years, and
became a great way of getting information from one place to
another with the invention of the telegraph. More importantly
for this example, though, it is a binary system, just like a
computer’s ones and zeros.

You might think of wireless networking, then, as being like
Morse code for computers. You plug a combined radio receiver and
transmitter in, and the computer is able to send out its
equivalent of dots and dashes (bits, in computer-speak) to get
your data from one place to another.

All About Frequencies

You might wonder, though, how the computer could possibly
transmit enough bits to send and receive data at the speed it
does. After all, there must be a limit on how much can be sent
in a second before it just becomes useless nonsense, right?
Well, yes, but the key to wireless networking is that it gets
around this problem.

First of all, wireless transmissions are sent at very high
frequencies, meaning that more data can be sent per second. Most
wireless connections use a frequency of 2.4 gigahertz (2.4
billion cycles per second) — a similar frequency to mobile
phones and microwave ovens. As you might know, though, a
frequency this high means that the wavelength must be very
short, which is why wireless networking only works over a
limited area.

In addition, wireless networks make use of a technique known as
‘frequency hopping’. They use dozens of frequencies in the range
they are given, and constantly switch between them. This makes
wireless networks more immune to interference from other radio
signals than they would be if they only transmitted on one
frequency.

Access Points

The final step is when it comes to all the computers on a
network sharing Internet access. This is done using a special
piece of wireless equipment called an access point. Access
points are more expensive than wireless cards for one computer,
as they contain radios that are capable of talking to around 100
computers at the same time, and sharing out access to the
Internet between them. Dedicated access points are only really
essential for larger networks, though — if you only have a few
computers, it is possible to use one of them as the access
point, or you could just get a wireless router.

They Understand Each Other

That’s all well and good, then, but how does wireless equipment
made by entirely different companies manage to work together
when this is all so complicated? Well, the answer is that there
are standards that all wireless devices follow. These standards
are technically called the 802.11 standards, and are set by the
IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). It is
thanks to people sticking to their standards that wireless
networking is so easy and cheap to use today.

You Don’t Need to Worry

If all this talk of frequencies has you a little worried, you
don’t need to be — wireless networking hardware and software
handles all of this automatically, without you needing to do a
thing. Don’t think that you’re going to have to tell one
wireless device what frequency another is using, because it’s
just not going to happen, alright? Wireless networking, for all
its complicated workings, is really far more simple to use than
you’d ever expect.

About the author:

Original Source: Articles-Galore.com

Information supplied and written by Lee Asher of CyberTech SoftShop

Suppliers of the DeadEasy
Ebook Maker and Publishing Wizard.

How far can wireless go? Well, really, the answer is as far as
you want it to, or as far as you can afford. You see, even
though each wireless transmitter has a range limit, you can
install things called wireless extension points, often called
repeaters, to boost the signal and make your network’s range
even longer.

So you’re not getting the 11Mbps speed that you thought your
card’s manufacturer promised? If you read your card or Access
Point’s spec carefully, you’ll probably see that data rates are
specified as a function of distance. Data rate drops off very
quickly with distance for 802.11b products.

What is a Repeater?

As you get further away from the origin of a wireless signal, it
gets weaker and weaker, until eventually it is impossible to
receive at all. No matter how much you spend on high-powered
wireless equipment, you will eventually reach a point where your
network just won’t stretch any further.

Some people solve this problem by running wires out as far as
they want the network to go, and having it ‘break out’ into
wireless every so often using a wireless access point. This can
be more trouble than it’s worth, though — what’s the point of
installing massive lengths of wire just to cover an area with
wireless access? You could just put ports in the wall, couldn’t
you?

Well, to fix this dilemma, some manufacturers have started to
produce wireless repeaters, even though they’re not part of the
wireless standard. These ‘extension points’ work as a relay,
simply taking the existing wireless signal and making it
stronger, making the range of the signal larger each time.

If you place the repeaters correctly, this can make it so that
you can move computers a long way away from the wired part of
the network (the router or access point) without stopping them
from working. The only requirement is that the ranges of the
points must overlap — after all, a repeater can’t repeat a
signal that it can’t receive.

How Do They Work?

To understand how repeaters work, you must remember that
wireless networking signals are really just radio signals.
Repeaters simply take all the radio signals they receive on the
frequency used by wireless communications (2.4Ghz) and use their
power to amplify and re-broadcast them. This process does not
degrade the signal, and can be done as many times as necessary.

In theory, you place wireless repeaters in a line for several
miles and so extend a wireless network out that far. Because
extension points don’t need all the computer technology required
in a router or an access point, they are relatively inexpensive,
and so this possibility isn’t as unlikely as it sounds.

Some companies, for example, use a combination of repeaters and
directional antennas (antennas that focus a wireless signal in
one direction) to connect two LANs that are miles apart. They
find it’s cheaper to do things this way than to worry about the
problems that come with doing it over the Internet or to install
their own underground wires. It is technology like repeaters
that could, in the future, help to build wireless networks
covering whole towns and cities.

Choosing a Repeater

For the moment, you’re limited to the bigger manufacturers when
choosing a repeater, and even some of them have it missing from
their product range. Different companies give their repeaters
different names, such as ‘Range Expander’ (Linksys) or ‘Range
Extender’ (D-Link).

When you’re thinking of buying a wireless extension point, there
are some things you need to think about. The most important
thing is whether it will work with your existing equipment –
because there’s no formal standard for wireless extension
points, there’s no guarantee that one you get will work on your
network. It’s best to stick to the same manufacturer that you
have the rest of your equipment from, or at least do a web
search to find other people who’ve made the combination work.

Another consideration is whether the extension point has any
Ethernet ports. It’s not an essential feature, but it can be
useful if you want to connect the extension to a wired network.
This is mainly only important if you’re trying to connect two
LANs wirelessly, although Ethernet can also be useful for
connecting devices if something breaks and you need to
troubleshoot the network.

About the author:

Original Source: Articles-Galore.com

Information supplied and written by Lee Asher of CyberTech SoftShop

Suppliers of the DeadEasy
Ebook Maker and Publishing Wizard.