wireless questions

[Handruin]

I just setup my first wireless router and I wanted to check in and see if I'm one of the people missing something obvious about wireless security.

I bought a netgear wgt624 (108Mbps) router and so far this is what I've done:

1. I've disabled the SSID braodcasting
2. I've changed the SSID to something not guessable
3. I've enabled WEP 128 bit and created a non-guessable pass-phrase
4. I've restricted host access based on MAC addresses

Am I missing anything else that is vital? I can't believe the range on this unit. I walked down my street 5 houses (700+ feet) and could still connect to the net. I'm going to take a drive with Laura later to see how far this thing broadcasts...

I tried to scan my own network using net stumbler and it could see a wireless AP, but it didn't show the SSID. It also displayed as encrypted, so it made me feel a little better.

 

[Fushigi]

- Disable the bands you don't use. IOW if you're using SuperG, tell it SuperG only to block g & b connections.
- If your wireless adapter supports it, use WPA instead of WEP. If your adapter doesn't support WPA, consider getting one that does.
- Update the firmware to the latest.
- Make sure the firewall is enabled. Configure as tighly as you reasonably can.
- Run in Infrastructure mode on the PC.
- Continue with AV and a personal FW on your workstation(s). If possible establish trusts with your workstations and exclude all others.

I had the 624 but just sold it to a coworker and stepped up to the 634 as I've a USB HD I want to share. I also have the WG511T in my laptop and the WG311T in my wife's PC. Running WPA & SuperG only. Going through 2 walls and a floor and my wife's PC still sees a 108Mbps signal. Quite nice.

Problems with wireless:
- WEP passphrases are considered trivial to discover. Monitor the line for a bit and it'll be detected. Cisco was trying to roll out dynamic WEP but WPA is better and not vendor-specific.
- MAC address spoofing is also far too easy. Again, a simple monitor will reveal the MACs of the devices in question.
- SSID broadcasting is bad, but a war driver once again can just listen for any conversation to pick up the current SSID.

 

[Handruin]

I have 3 wireless cards...11b, 11g, and the superg so I need to leave them open for now. At the moment I can't get my superg card to connect any higher than 54Mb even though I tried forcing it to 108Mb. I got the combination netear router + card (WG511T).

I believe only two of the adapters support WPA, but now as I think of it, I will only be using that one while I'm at work, so I'll enable WPA.

The first thing I did was update the firmware...it was way behind.

The firewall is enabled, and so is the SPI.

All PC's are running in infrastructure mode.

My main PC has no file sharing enabled and I have passwords on my machine.

I'll leave the MAC filtering enabled just because it's better than nothing. I definetly disabled the SSID broadcasting, so that'll help the casual browser.

Thanks for the help, I'll do some more google searching to see if there is anything else I might have overlooked. I'm also going to update my WG511T drivers to see if that helps with the 108Mb issue I'm having.

 

[Howell]

I'm also going to update my WG511T drivers to see if that helps with the 108Mb issue I'm having.

Also look into how you have the antennae angled. Very little of the signal projects toward the base of the antennae.

 

[Handruin]

My laptop is a foot and a half from the router. I updated the drivers and they were one major revision higher that what was on the CD-ROM (not surprising). I now get 108Mbps, but it isn't locked...it switches around even when I'm sitting right next to the antenna. It stays mostly at 54Mbps and occasionally hops to 108... not sure why.

 

[Howell]

Maybe you are too close.
I get a consistent 108 throught two walls and the floor over 15-20 feet.

 

[Handruin]

I've been fighting with my netgear wgt624 to keep my wireless connections active. Tonight I've spent some time playing with the settings and I've found that the "Auto 108Mbps" option is terrible and unreliable even from 1 foot away from the router.

My testing consisted of copying a folder full of jpeg images from my main PC to my laptop via wireless connection. My main pc is connected with a 100Mb cable to the netgear unit. The laptop sports the (WG511T) 108 Mbps wireless card. Note that I've also encountered numerous disconnects and transfer problems with another 802.11b wireless card using the same laptop.

Today I became annoyed that it was next to impossible to copy 259 images of all different sizes with a total directory size of 553MB's to my laptop. The transfer was from my main PC to my wireless laptop using a copy and paste method through a mapped network drive. Every time I tried to copy the directory, the wireless card would disconnect after 30-45 seconds.

After enough disconnects I became annoyed and decided to investigate the issue. As a usual first step I made sure I had the latest drivers and firmware applied. Both my wireless card and router had the latest available versions. (router: V4.1.11_1.0.1, WG511T: 3.0.1.6/2.17.18.4 March 08, 2004)

Next I tested the following:

I disabled the wireless encryption for this test. The laptop is placed about one foot from the router to remove the possibility that distance is causing the issue. (I understand that there still may be interference issues)

Router set to "b and g" mode. (Disables 108Mbps)
I copied the same folder of jpeg’s from my main PC to my laptop and the transfer took exactly 3 minute 29 seconds. No disconnects during this transfer and the netgear transmit/receive performance meter pegged at 100% during 99% of the time. The average receiving Mbps was roughly 24.

Router set to "108Mbps only" (no other connection mode accepted)
I copied the same folder from my main PC to my laptop and the transfer took exactly 2 minutes and 5 seconds. No disconnects during this transfer and the netgear transmit/receive performance meter pegged at 100% during 95% of the time. The average receiving Mbps was roughly 38.

Router set to "Auto 108Mbps"
I copied the same folder from my main PC to my laptop and the transfer took exactly 11 minutes and 18 seconds. No disconnects during this transfer and the netgear transmit/receive performance meter was NOT pegged at 100% during the transfer. The average receiving Mbps was roughly 5. I watched as the connection speeds hopped around from 108, to 72, to 48, to 36, to 54, to 18, to 96…and so on. The screen updates every second, and every second there was a new connection speed listed. This did not occur during the other two tests. During the other two tests, the speed would seldom drop from the maximum available connection speed.

I believe there may have been no disconnects due to the laptop being a foot from the router. When I encounter the drops, I'm usually 30+ feet away from the router. I think that the issue I've found, combined with an increased distance causes the connection to drop.

It seems as though I will not be able to use the 108 Mbps ability of this router. Laura’s laptop has a built-in 54g wireless card and I’m not going to spend money on another WG511T. My next option to fix this problem is to set the router to the “b and g” setting so that we can both use the wireless ability.

Tomorrow I will run the two more tests, one with WPA-PSK enabled and the second with my laptop at a distance of roughly 30 feet. Until then, I’m happy to have a workaround for this issue. Thanks for reading my ramble; hopefully this saves someone else a headache of issues (Or maybe someone can tell me what I'm doing wrong).

FWIW, I do have a cordless phone, but it does not operate at 2.4 GHz, it's in the 5GHz range.

 

[Handruin]

At roughly 30 feet (through walls):

Router mode = "b and g":
3 minutes 25 seconds to transfer the same files. No disconnects.

Router mode = "108Mbps only":
2 minutes 11 seconds to transfer the same files. No disconnects.

Router mode = "Auto 108Mbps":
10 minutes, 5 seconds to transfer the same files. No disconnects.

 

[Handruin]

At roughly 30 feet with WPA-SPK enabled:

Router Mode = "b and g":
3 Minutes 42 seconds to transfer the same files. No Disconnects.

Now I'm going to bed.

 

[Fushigi]

I understand the desire to use the 108Mb mode; that's the path I took. I plunked down the $ for a 311T card for my wife's desktop to get beyond the b mode of her old D-Link USB thumb and get an adapter with WPA support. My laptop has the 511T and the router is the 634U. So I'm safe in 108-only mode.

Based on your measured throughputs, I have to ask if the performance difference between g & 108 is going to matter in the real world? For large file transfers, it'll take more time, but for every day stuff like printer sharing & Internet access, your bottlenecks will be elsewhere.

Anyway, I'd recommend continuing to check Netgear's site for firmware revs for both card & router; theie updates have added capabilities as well as fixed bugs so far; perhaps your issue will be addressed. You may want to open a support case and submit what you've told us. Netgear may not know this is an issue if it hasn't been reported.

Anecdotally, I've heard you can have issues if the wireless PC is too close to the WAP/Router. I'd suggest a minimum distance of 5 or 6 feet vs. the 1 foot you used. Your 30' overall, even through a couple of walls, is a good environment and should maintain 80+% signal strength and full 108Mb mode support.

 

[Mercutio]

My experience with the 634 is that its range is lousy. I bought one for a customer and another for myself (I'm using it only as a NAS device), and found them to have only about 2/3 the range of a WRT54G.

If I get time today I'll write up my thoughts on WRE54G range extenders, too.

 

[Will Rickards WT]

When I transfer images I bring the laptop to the router and hook it up with an actual cable. It was just too slow over the wireless connection. I'm only in B mode because of the built-in wireless of the centrino platform.

 

[Handruin]

I've submitted a support ticket and described my issue. It was a long e-mail, so who knows if they'll even get back to me. For now I'll leave my wireless set to b and g so that I can make use of it without problems. Maybe in the next couple years they'll fix the issue. There isn't a life shattering performance difference between the 108Mbps and 54Mbps, but since I own a 108 card, I'd like to use it.

It also won't be often that I'm transfering large amounts of data through the wireless. But case in point, I actually wanted these images to transfer between my two systems and I actually took out my 802.11b card hoping I'd improve the transfer time using my 108 card. It actually made it worse due to the issue I've found.

 

[time]

At a guess, the "Auto" option is a botched attempt to allow 802.11g and Super-G to co-exist.

If a Super-G device is allowed to utilize 100% of the available bandwidth, it will severely impact on any 802.11g devices (essentially, they are locked out while it is in operation). So I'd speculate that Netgear is trying to throttle Super-G operation (the goal being to achieve unrestricted 802.11g) and making a hash of it.

Out of curiosity, does it make any difference if you disable everything that isn't Super-G?

 

[Handruin]

It did make a world of difference in my testing when I set the router to use "b and g" only, see the figures I posted above. However, I didn't try to disabled the 108Mbps while the router is set to "b and g". I don't know if that would help any. There are a few other settings that may be SUperG related. I'll play around with those to see if it makes any difference.

Your throttling theory sounds good, but I don't know enough of the 108Mbps architecture to speculate. I read that the netgear achieves the 108Mbps by teaming two 54Mbps chips together. They are made by a company called Atheros. I've read that people use the drivers created by Atheros for better diagnostics. There is a bunch of FAQ's here.

I may try using the drivers from Atheros once I've read some more about it. Last night my card was working better, but after an hour or so, it started to disconnect frequently. So far I'm not extremely happy with this device.

 

[Fushigi]

Last night my card was working better, but after an hour or so, it started to disconnect frequently. So far I'm not extremely happy with this device.

So, what happened after the hour to trigger the instability? Any environmental issues? Was the PC Card getting too warm and perhaps overheating? Any poorly behaving applications?

 

[Mercutio]

I've found "Super" equipment to not be very reliable in proprietary operating modes. I went through something similar to what Doug is describing with Netgear and DLink "SuperB" hardware.

 

[Handruin]

Funny you mention heat. I did notice my laptop was very warm on the bottom...conveniently next to the PCMCIA card, but I don't think the card was physically too warm (but that's relative). I'll try it again and see if heat is the issue. I was on my first floor which is below the router, but I had been in the same chair for about an hour before things started to get bad. The disconnects progressively became worse. During this time, the card was running a 54g. I've disabled the 108Mbps mode. for now.

 

[Adcadet]

could the card(s) on a laptop or desktop be switching modes to conserve power? I've occasinally had signal dips on my laptops, both at school and at home, and always suspected it was because it was dropping the power level to conserve energy. Why that would affect the signal strength (since I assume that refers to the signal the card sees) I haven't a clue.

I recently got a Palm Tungsten C, and I love it's built in Wifi support. I definitely have to be careful about avoiding areas with a weak signal, but I was able to check my email while sitting in a car on campus waiting for my wife to finish a job interview.

 

[Handruin]

In all my tests and problems, my laptop is plugged into the wall outlet. The power saving modes are set to desktop, so the only part that shuts down is the screen after 40 minutes of inactivity.

When it's on battery, it's a whole different story. But in all of my problems, none have been while I'm using the battery except occasionally when I unplug the power cable, the network card will freeze the laptop. I have to reboot to fix the issue.