networking

Thin wedge driven into WPA wireless security protocol: TKIP compromised

A lot of folks these days have at least part of their home network on wireless ethernet, or WiFi. I have two wireless access points in my house, for example, and plan on adding a third. Wireless networking has security considerations: unless your WiFi network is encrypted, someone outside your home can use your bandwidth or, potentially worse, intercept your data. Wireless security was improved significantly a few years ago with the introduction of WPA (WiFi Protected Access) after the previous security method, WEP (Wireless Encryption Protocol) was “cracked”. Since then, wireless networking has been pretty much secure against any intrusion. Until now…

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Longest outage of my site in five years

Kelly’s World has been down since I left on vacation on Wednesday. Of course my faithful readers (Hi Mom!) have my sincere apologies. From what I can see, my main network switch crashed within hours of us getting in my car. I have no real explanation for the failure other than some sort of digital empathy relating to the buyer’s remorse I feel regarding the DI-LB604 I bought a couple of months or so ago. I am wondering if the firmware update I did on that switch a few days before we left is at the root of the failure. Sometime soon I’m going to write a blog entry regarding my fun during the past few months regarding my network configuration, but today is not the day to start that…

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A decade later, and Wireless networking still sucks

I would love to have a no-compromise wireless network in my home. In this imaginary scenario, I would be able to put a computer anywhere in the house, even carry one out onto the patio, and get something approaching gigabit Ethernet speeds. Heck, I’d even be happy with half that: 300 Mbps… or even a really reliable true 100 Mbps link- that would be nice.

Unfortunately, after about a decade of living with wireless, I can say that surprisingly little actual progress has been made. Using wireless still means giving up network performance…

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My patience wears thin…

I like experimenting with my computers and network gear. It is even fun sometimes when things don’t work properly at first, so long as I can work out a solution.

But even my patience with technology has its limits. Late last year, for example, I more or less “gave up” (at least for the time being) on Vista and Windows, and switched to using a Macintosh as my primary machine. What has me on the warpath now? My network… and specifically my Linksys/Cisco gear, and even more specifically my Linksys RV016 router/switch.

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