Linksys E4200 134.99 at local Costco

[Sol]

Are you saying that on your WNDR3700 that a wireless NIC can automatically read the security settings by pressing its WPS button without you having to press the routers button? I have a WNDR3700 and it does not do that on mine.

Or are you just complaining that it has the WPS feature and you can't disable it. Well don't press your routers WPS button and it is disabled. Nothing is exchanged if you don't press that button within 2 minutes of a wireless NIC pressing its WPS button.

WPS incorporates multiple authentication mechanisms, one of which requires you to push a button. Another one requires the connecting device to supply a PIN which is usually printed on the WPS device. The PIN mechanism is the one with the recently discovered gaping holes and it doesn't require any buttons to be pressed.

I'm currently on the lookout for a low powered system which supports PCI-Express. Eventually I'll probably want to use 802.11ac but it doesn't look like anyone will be making ac chips for mini-pci slots. (A separate AP is an option, but not as neat)

 

[Gilbo]

Are you saying that on your WNDR3700 that a wireless NIC can automatically read the security settings by pressing its WPS button without you having to press the routers button? I have a WNDR3700 and it does not do that on mine.

Or are you just complaining that it has the WPS feature and you can't disable it. Well don't press your routers WPS button and it is disabled. Nothing is exchanged if you don't press that button within 2 minutes of a wireless NIC pressing its WPS button.

I just can't disable it.

There's an exploit in the wild for WPS that allows WPA networks to be cracked. I was trying to disable WPS as a workaround to protect my wireless networks.

 

[Mercutio]

I'm currently on the lookout for a low powered system which supports PCI-Express.

I would be shocked if we didn't see some interesting systems in mITX or picoITX with some kind of fast ARM CPU and a reasonable subset of I/O ports not long after Windows 8 is released.

I did go and take a quick look, but the only products I can find only enable the USB portion of the mPCI-e slot, which isn't terribly useful for DIY router purposes.

 

[BingBangBop]

I just can't disable it.

There's an exploit in the wild for WPS that allows WPA networks to be cracked. I was trying to disable WPS as a workaround to protect my wireless networks.

Fair enough. I did some research and it seems you are correct that the pin form of WPS can be hacked with just a few thousand tries. The current recommendation, for prevention, is to disable WPS to prevent this and on the WNDR3700 there is no option to disable WPS. I guess we have to wait for a new BIOS update.

There is one way you can deal with this issue: Advanced-> Wireless settings-> Wireless Card Access List. What I've done is list the only MAC addresses that are allowed access. I got the list of MAC devices from Maintenance->Attached devices. Even if WPS is hacked, they won't have any access to the network unless they've also spoofed one of my listed MAC addresses which they are not likely to know since the wireless streams are encrypted. I did test it after I turned all security off and I could not connect with an unlisted device. So even if WPS was hacked, they still could not connect.

An access list will make it less convenient to add a new wireless device but for me, that is not a frequent event so I'll just deal.

 

[MaxBurn]

~There is one way you can deal with this issue: Advanced-> Wireless settings-> Wireless Card Access List. What I've done is list the only MAC addresses that are allowed access. I got the list of MAC devices from Maintenance->Attached devices. Even if WPS is hacked, they won't have any access to the network unless they've also spoofed one of my listed MAC addresses which they are not likely to know since the wireless streams are encrypted. I did test it after I turned all security off and I could not connect with an unlisted device. So even if WPS was hacked, they still could not connect.

An access list will make it less convenient to add a new wireless device but for me, that is not a frequent event so I'll just deal.

The article I linked mentions a workaround for this.

You could also set up MAC address filtering on your router (which only allows specifically whitelisted devices to connect to your network), but a sufficiently savvy hacker could detect the MAC address of a whitelisted device and use MAC address spoofing to imitate that computer.

Double bummer.

 

[Sol]

At least some of the packets in the early part of a wifi hand shake are unencrypted and contain the MAC address of the endpoint so getting a MAC to spoof is just a matter of timing (Or interfering with the network enough to force endpoints to reconnect).

The best looking option I've seen so far for a PCI-E router is an AMD Bobcat mini-itx board. An 18watt TPD for the CPU is a little higher than I'd like but a couple of them have mini PCI-E slots so it'd be a nice compact smoothwall box.

Maybe an ARM SOC with USB3 would be a better option...

 

[Will Rickards]

The netgear WNDR4500 has been great.
Easy setup, using the 50ft cables I bought (one to the verizon router, one run to the basement office).
I mounted it just above the door frame in the hallway leading to the basement. So it is on the 1st floor roughly in the middle of the house. While the verizon router is in the basement next to the box they installed there.
I get coverage in the basement, 1st floor, 2nd floor, and even the 3rd floor attic/spare bedroom. I think I even can get a signal in my parking lot. Which is three houses down from mine. There are 4 townhouses together in my development and I'm on the end, the one opposite the parking lot.

And now my blu-ray player seems to consistently connect. Before it only occasionally worked, even though all other devices showed full signal in the same room. I put it on the 5Ghz band SSID. I used separate SSID's.

Only problem has been my wife's laptop which seems to connect, then disconnect, then connect again. Not sure why. I used the same SSID/password so the client's wouldn't need to be reconfigured.

 

[Mercutio]

Only problem has been my wife's laptop which seems to connect, then disconnect, then connect again.

802.11 can be frustrating. I swapped an Airport Extreme in to replace an Encore cheapie at a client's office couple weeks ago. The feedback I've gotten is that it's nice and fast for most people but ironically the two Apple computers in the office seem to disconnect more often.

 

[MaxBurn]

802.11 can be frustrating. I swapped an Airport Extreme in to replace an Encore cheapie at a client's office couple weeks ago. The feedback I've gotten is that it's nice and fast for most people but ironically the two Apple computers in the office seem to disconnect more often.

Try locking the channel selection for g and n from auto to some specific channel.

First off Lion has some generally agreed on wifi problems, apparently the last one was better and Lion has yet to equal its wifi performance. I see that some people are using the older driver which fixes the problem.

Now I have one in my house as well and it was having wifi problems too. Even weirder it was causing my iPhone to be kicked off also, something that device wasn't doing before bringing a mac into the house. I tried some general stuff I found on the forums which didn't really help but given two devices either couldn't get data or just couldn't even see the SSID when it was down I blamed it on the time capsule (same thing as airport extreme). The one thing I changed which made a real difference three days ago was locking down both the g and the n from auto configure channel to just selecting a channel and locking it there. Not a problem sense then.

I live in a condo and I can see nineteen SSID names on the macbook and ten on the iPhone, it is a little crowded. I don't know if the WAP was hopping around or catching interference or something but this is a worked for me thing.

 

[Stereodude]

For giggles I bought a refurb Linksys E3000 (Simultaneous Dual Band + Gigabit) from Newegg. I straight away put Tomato USB on it. So far so good. I was a little surprised at how fast 5.0gHz N is (didn't bother to benchmark 2.4gHz N). I was able to copy data from my file server to my laptop at ~18MB/sec.