Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 19th Jun 2008 20:23 UTC, submitted by Mark Wielaard
While the history of wireless computer networks dates back to the 1970 with the University of Hawaii's ALOHAnet (I wish we retained that name instead of 802.11x), it has only been during the past, say, 10 years that the technology started to make serious inroads into the consumer market - your home. The latest and greatest variant is 802.11n, and while promoted as the best thing since sliced bread, Frank Ohlhorst has his reservations, and debunks 5 myths concerning 802.11n.
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Member since:
2007-09-06
Fixed machines us Gigabit wire limited to there NIC maximum with my primary workstation using two onboard gigabits.
PDA and other mobiles use 11g unless there is a reason to attach a cable.
Guest mac addresses can be added easily though this is more of filtering to keep my router listening too noise from only systems it thinks it recognizes. (anyone can put on a MAC address disquise after all)
WPA/WPA2 provides the real security authentication; devices that only support lower encryption strengths don't get to join the network.
My static/dynamic DHCP assignment scheme distinctly displays any guest IP for quick identification.
Every device provides it's own locally hardenned protection above and beyond the wire or wireless layer protections.
My current goal is to be able to sniff my network and get nothing unencrypted; the real challenges will be http and other plaintext protocols used outside my router. Almost all internal interaction has been sanatised by choices like using ssh instead of ftp/sftp/ftps and so on. The next step up would be too setup as an encrypted blacknet (is that a term already?) tunnelling my entire internal network but even I have too concede that it's a home network not the NSA offices.
Wire will always be the faster and more secure