Roffes blogg

I get a lot of geek time at my computer these days. I love it. Have spent the day securing my wireless network as much as possible. My old setup was very simple to breach. I only had a 40/64-bit encryption key and no mac filtering. I also distributed ip addresses to everyone that wanted one.

What I have done now is to increase the encryption to the maximum level of my access point, allow only known mac addresses and only give out fixed ip’s to these known mac addresses. This is not secure enough against someone that really wants to hack into my network, but now it requires a certain level of knowledge, time, tools and knowing how to use them to crack my net. This wasn’t the case earlier.

I have considered securing the net more, but this requires some studying and possibly purchasing of network tools. I don’t think I want to do that. I have nothing top secret on my net and I have secured the internet access with a proxy server you have to authenticate against. So not only do you have to know how to hack mac-addresses, wep-keys and interpret the traffic, but you also need a username and a password to get onto the internet. I feel my net is quite secure now. At least more secure than most of the wifi-nets “out there”.

I also tried to stop broadcasting the ssid or network name of my wlan, but this created problems with the windows computers, since they automatically selects any network who broadcasts their names. And since some neighbor has a net broadcasting the name, it is impossible for one of my windows clients to use my net. Silly, but according to google, microsoft knowledge base and some very competent people I chat with it is not any security effect in hiding the network name as long as I use mac filter and wep encryption. And I guess they are all right about that.

Well, on to the fire. Wifey, Charlotte and I went for a drive to kill some time this evening. When we were close to the fire station, a lot of fire trucks, police cars and ambulances with howling sirens passed the gas station we were parked at. My wife wanted to follow them and watch and since she is the driver in the family I had nothing to say about it.

And it turned out that the fire was the neighbor-house of where I grew up. Actually in a house I wanted to buy 4 years ago, but didn’t get it. I’m happy about that now. According to the newspapers noone has gotten hurt and the houses affected are evacuated. But it’s a bit sad to see this happen to a place I have a lot of memories from. Probably I know someone who still live(d) there too.

Well.. that’s all I have today. Except my menu. Her it is:

Menu for saturday march 26, 2005:

0930: 2 slices of bread with cheese.
1330: potluck. Way to much food eaten. Impossible to write it all down.
1700: 3 turkey hot dogs.
2200: 100 grams of wine gum and 50 grams of chips.