Finding commercial wireless operators is easy - very often you can identify the signage hanging outside a cafe, fast food restaurant or on the walls of a hall. If not, when you power up your Windows XP computer equipped with a wireless card, it will display a list of wireless networks available. Examining the SSIDs will often allow you to identify the network operator instantly.
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I’m using Linksys WRT54G Wireless Router and Wireless-G USB Adapter at home. This is how I secure wireless home network. Apply these 10 steps to lock down both Linksys wireless access points and wireless routers.

Step 1 : Change The Password

It is very important to change the device’s default password. Login to your router and enter the default password. The version of the firmware or the router that you are using will determine where the Change Password button is located. Make sure you find it. This is the single most important step. Change the default password and choose a password that contains both numbers and letters. This will reduce the possibility of your password being guessed or hacked.
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Wireless router are by default are completely insecure. The default settings of brand new router were purposely set to be insecure to facilitate the easiest possible installation. If you leave these settings at default, it’s essentially similiar to putting up a big sign in front of your house, saying “Please come in and rob me.”

Here are basic 6 simple steps to secure your wireless router.
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Wireless routers are easy to setup, just turn on and plugging them in, but are extremely insecure and vulnerable by default. In this article, I will focus on optimizing a standard 802.11g wireless router in two areas :- speed and security. I will be using NetGear WGR614 for working example.

Equipment Selection

Even before you go out and buy a wireless router, you should plan ahead in advance which brand and model of router you desired. The ideal situation would be get a wireless router and required client adapters from same brand, especially if you’re buying 802.11g enchanced router, like the Netgear WGT624 108Mbps router and the WG511T PCMCIA card, or the WG111T USB adapter.

This is because the proprietary enchancements will only work with their own family within the same brand. You can still connect standard 802.11g/b devices to it, but would’t be able to fully utilize the potential high throughput speeds these technologies have to offer.
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If you just want to be able to wirelessly stream music from your PC to your powerful boom box in another room, the NETGEAR Wireless Digital Music Player will be able to sing to your tune in wireless 802.11b/g style. It can even make your stereo system churn out tunes from Internet radio stations worldwide.
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I received email from Johns on setting up wireless home network.

I currently use Alcatel modem (Speed Touch 330) given to me from ISP and I simply can’t get to work with Gentoo Linux (2.6.9 Kernel). I decided to build a wireless home network, so I’m planning to buy a D-Link DSL-G604T wireless ADSL router.
My first question is: Is this hardware fully compatible with Linux or do I need to install any drivers as with the Alcatel modem?
I have notebook and wanted to connect it to the network through a wireless cardbus adapter. I want a card supported natively by a kernel modulem, something that could work straight out of the box. After some reading, I found that it should be a card with Prism 2/2.5/3 chipset, but I’m confused and don’t know how to find a manufacturer or vendor of a popular cheap card with that chipset. So my second is, can you suggest a good adaptor using Prism chipset?

The wireless router from D-Link will make the connection to your ISP over DSL circuit, so you will not need any PPPoE or PPPoA support on the Linux system.

You can connect straight into the router using Ethernet and DHCP against the router for an internal IP address. Essentially, everything will be offloaded on to the router, making you Linux system a plain old workstation, rather than a router.

As far as PCMCIA wireless adaptors are concerned, you can check out www.linux-wlan.org or www.prism54.org

You’ll find that Prism54 identifies devices supporting the 802.22g standard as well as 802.22b for faster connectivity. Prism2 and Prism54 cards are identified by Knoppix at boot time, and will enable you to access the internet easily without having to install a large number of supporting packages.

You would be pretty surprised to know how many people set up a broadband connection, get a nice wireless router for it and then proceed to broadcast their connection for all within range to see and indeed use. All the more worrying is that if you use it as a network hub, then you can give people access to shared folders on your PC. So many people do this in fact that there is a hobby grown up around it called wardriving, where techies drive around with a wireless enabled laptop and use a piece of software, often NetStumbler, to see how many insecure wireless networks they can find.

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