Setting up Home Network

[rednek tek]

After 10 Years on the Net, with more than 2 of those years on a 1.5M/256K DSL connection, recently upgraded to 3.0M/512K, I am finally getting around to setting up a home network. I ordered, but haven't yet received, a Dell Inspiron 1520 Laptop with the T5550 processor and 2GB of DDR2 memory before the deadline passed for getting Windows XP and luckily received a free upgrade to the 128MB NVIDIA GeForce 8400M video card. Sorry, couldn't help bragging a bit! I ordered from Newegg, and have received, a Linksys WRT150N router.

My questions:

Is there anyway that I can set up my HP 5110v all in one, USB interface, as a network printer? I will only have the laptop and my homebuilt desktop on the network.

Secondly, I will likely flash the router with 3rd party firmware. I bought this router because I wanted N wireless capability and caught it on sale for $53 and change. I gather from the Newegg reviews that there are better, though more expensive, routers available. I hope I do not regret my decision to buy this one, even with Newegg's liberal return policy. According to reviews on the Newegg site, the Linksys firmware tends to be a bit on the flaky and unstable side. One of the reviewer recommended firmware flashes is dd wrt, which is open source, Linux based code. Of course flashing with 3rd party firmware voids the warranty if it should be discovered that I did so. I have flashed firmware before, so I am familiar with the process. Even so, what are the potential pitfalls I may not know of? According to reviews, the router will be more stable and have better range, and more settings are tweakable with dd wrt. Do any of you know about
THIS or other alternatives.

Linksys would have you believe that the sky will fall if you don't run their setup CD, which I will NOT do. I will do the manual setup, just as I did when setting up my DSL modem. I will not knowingly install anything on my computer that has Norton in it. After getting ripped off with Norton SystemWorks 2005, and getting fed up with the crashes and instability caused by Norton hogging the system resources, I have been there, done that and ain't gonna make that mistake ever again. All that after having used the 1998 release (version 5?) of SystemWorks for years with good results. Since Linksys is now owned by Cisco and Linksys products have had a good reputation for years, I can only think of that as positives, although they and all other OEM's really need to ditch Norton.


Thanks in advance for any advice.

[Teknophobia]

I'll answer the first one for you - yes, it is possible, with one small caveat. You will presumably have the printer connected to your desktop. You will therefore be able to share that printer with any other PC/Laptop on your network, but you will only be able to print to said printer from another PC/Laptop if your desktop is switched on.

TEk

[Shinma]

As already pointed out by Teknophobia,
Multifunction printer must be connected to a system that is on with sharing of printer configured/enabled.

Two most commonly mentioned third party firmware would be DD-WRT and the other would be Tomato.
At last check, when a WRT54G router was used as a reference device,
DD-WRT supposedly resulted in a more consistent performance over Tomato.
Keep in mind that software changes will not compensate for any poor hardware design/limitations/choices...

[rednek tek]

As I type this I am connected to this site via wireless laptop after having resolved a few glitches. I turn modem on, allow it to sync with dslam, turn router on, allow it to stabilize a bit then boot laptop, and connect with no fuss. But a couple of unresolved issues remain with router configuration and/or security. I have changed the default router password, SPI is enabled, Filter anonymous internet requests and filter ident enabled, with filter multicast and NAT redirect unchecked. MAC Address filtering is enabled and set for only 3 nodes. Here's the rub: when I enabled wireless security, using WEP, the laptop lost connectivity. Options are WPA and WPA2 personal, WPA and WPA2 enterprise, and RADIUS. I don't think that I have to go to great lengths to secure my network against unauthorized access, considering where I live, there's not that many computer literate people around, and probably none able to hack a network, but I am not taking any chances. Any suggestions for optimizing security settings without causing connectivity issues would be appreciated. Also, I am still considering flashing my router with DD-WRT. I knew when I bought my router the firmware was prone to be unstable and lose connection. Supposedly DD-WRT is more stable and has greater range. Problem is, there are no do-overs if something goes wrong and I would end up with a brick that the warranty would not cover if Linksys should discover I had flashed it with 3rd party firmware. Suggestions, Ideas?

[Tuttle]

Enable WPA2-Personal for encryption with a long passphrase. Configure it over a wired connection, then make the laptop disconnect/reconnect from the wireless network in order to get prompted for the passphrase.

Turn off MAC filtering; it's easily bypassed by anyone with a few extra seconds to spare, but it'll bite you badly later on when you've forgotten about it and you bring a new machine into the system.

That's pretty much it.

[lgbpop]

Turn off MAC filtering; it's easily bypassed by anyone with a few extra seconds to spare, but it'll bite you badly later on when you've forgotten about it and you bring a new machine into the system.

You can say THAT again.

[rednek tek]

Thanks Tuttle, I have done as you suggested, the security LED on the router is lit, I am surfing, and all seems to be ok. Is there any way to test security other than a trusted friend with a wireless laptop? And, this is not too important, but it bugs me that I cannot now surf into my modem through the router. What might be the problem? Showing my ignorance here, but how is MAC filtering so easily bypassed? I am new to networking. I may yet flash my router with DD-WRT, but haven't yet done my homework on that, so that will be sometime in the future if I do.

[Tuttle]

Open up Computer Management (right-click My Computer | Manage will do it), go to Device Manager, and double-click on your network card's entry. On the Advanced tab there will almost certainly be a setting called "MAC Address", "Network Address" or "Physical Address" -- that allows you to override the network card's address with one you specify. Access to that can probably be scripted so you don't have to waste time clicking on things.

Now consider that every frame sent over a network contains two MAC addresses -- that of the source and that of the destination. On a wireless network with MAC filtering enabled, at least one of those will be valid (the other might be another valid client, or it might just be the router's).

Join the two together and you're less than a minute away from defeating MAC filtering.


You can test your security by making your laptop disconnect and reconnect (through the software, not any hardware switch on the antenna). You should get re-prompted for the WPA key, and if you get it wrong you should fail to get an IP address.


As for not being able to access the modem, that's kind of normal. Your router pretty much ignores the modem and assumes the next hop is your ISP. Depending on the router it might be possible to configure things so that you can get to the modem, but I've never put in the effort -- you shouldn't need to configure the modem once it's set up anyway.

[rednek tek]

OK, I get it now. MAC address spoofing, in other words. I have seen what you refer to, but it just didn't click that it was that simple.