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My wireless network was working fine, my ethernet bridge was receiving a signal from the router, all was well. Until....... my father, from whose house the signal is transmitted, gets a phone call from a bloke down the road. The bloke says he's picking up the signal, it's not encrypted, does my father want a hand to encrypt it? My father, immediately wipes the router of all its settings and disconnects it, because he thinks he's being set up to be blackmailed. I've now set up WEP encryption and his PC works fine but the bridge at my house is just flashing away as if it is not receiving any sort of signal at all. I don't know how to access the bridge to look at the settings, or what to do next. Any suggestions? Edited by sheepfish at 15:38:42 29-01-2005 |
Sigh. Wireless network issues, any suggestions welcome.
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sheepfish 1,168 posts
Registered 19 years ago -
Nuttah 1,840 posts
Seen 9 years ago
Registered 18 years agoyour doing wireless from house to house? how far away from each other are you?
I presume this is a 54mbs type wireless, My guess is that when you encrypt especially at 128 bit, your signal strength goes way down. if you want to keep the connection secure but keep the signal strength then turn off the WEP and lock down the wireless connections to the used MAC addresses only (plus hide the ssid).
That should not degrade the signal too much.
see how that goes
edit: this may make the above irrelevent, but are your bridged via cable?
Edited by Nuttah at 15:48:55 29-01-2005 -
sheepfish 1,168 posts
Registered 19 years agocheers nuttah, i didn't know that WEP encryption affected the signal, although that does make sense because all the characteristics are that there is no signal being received at the other house. I'll just restricting the MAC addresses then.
To answer you're question, the 2 houses are about 150m apart in a direct line. The transmission is via some netgear antennas. -
sam_spade 15,745 posts
Seen 1 week ago
Registered 20 years agoIf you go into the properties of your Network adaptor there is a little button called Configure. Then click advanced, look down the list and there should be an option to trade some bandwidth for distance. So you can adjust it so that the signal reaches further. You shouldn't notice much difference. -
Mike_Hunt 23,524 posts
Seen 2 years ago
Registered 19 years agoIf you received the signal before then you still should now. I've no idea why nuttah's under the impression that encryption has an effect on how far the signal travels - it doesn't. It can slow down the transmittion of data slightly as more information is being sent, but it can still be sent the same distance.
Can you even detect the presence of the router at all? Or can you see it but not connect? Did you turn on any addition security features such as Mac address filtering or disabling the SSID?
[MH] -
Mike_Hunt 23,524 posts
Seen 2 years ago
Registered 19 years agosheepfish wrote:
If you just restrict the MAC addresses then you'll still be broadcasting your information in clear form. I'd be very wary about this as you know you've got a bloke who lives down the street who has some idea of what he's talking about.
cheers nuttah, i didn't know that WEP encryption affected the signal, although that does make sense because all the characteristics are that there is no signal being received at the other house. I'll just restricting the MAC addresses then.
To answer you're question, the 2 houses are about 150m apart in a direct line. The transmission is via some netgear antennas.
Get WEP going at least. I'm under the impression that you've secured it so much that even you can't get on! Check the settings on both machines. Are you using XP + SP2? If you are then there's an option to save the config to a USB memory stick which you can then insert into every other PC on the network thus ensuring all the configs match.
[MH] -
Nuttah 1,840 posts
Seen 9 years ago
Registered 18 years agoMike_Hunt wrote:
If you received the signal before then you still should now. I've no idea why nuttah's under the impression that encryption has an effect on how far the signal travels - it doesn't. It can slow down the transmittion of data slightly as more information is being sent, but it can still be sent the same distance.
Can you even detect the presence of the router at all? Or can you see it but not connect? Did you turn on any addition security features such as Mac address filtering or disabling the SSID?
[MH]
Mike, it can degrade the signal strength, which in turn means that you can get lower speeds or even no signal at all, I could have however phrased it better, because it indirectly affects the overall range, as encryption does add more packet overheads.
given that, and the fact we have 150m apart connection bridge (which even outside is pretty far, max range normally imho about 150-250 metres LOS), its quite likely that the encryption is causing the loss of signal to me at least.
hiding the ssid, and using mac addresses assigned only is by no stretch of the imagination a secure network, however it takes away 90% of all risks. adding WEP would bring that to 98% or so as even 128bit WEP isnt unhackable.
tbh I dont like wireless at all when it comes to security. but you should be able to bring WEP back into your network sheep, but that would involve a lot more fiddling with both the netgear AP's -
Foregone-Reality 2,216 posts
Seen 11 years ago
Registered 18 years ago128 bit encryption hammers the quality of my signal as well..and I have no understanding as to why it does.
Good old 64 bit hasn't let me down though. -
Cheers for the advice guys. I've got it running on just restricted MAC addresses. The WEP encryption makes the signal drop out and as far as I can tell, it's through a physical loss of signal. I've configured my bridge to work properly, because it works at my parents house, but not here.
I haven't had a look at trading bandwidth for distance, I'll see, but I don't want PGR2 getting laggy.gif)
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