Mindless Conversation

I have been setting up a few wireless networks for friends recently. As I have been working with my friends I have realized that they really have bad ideas of what wireless network security entails. So I am trying to put this little article together in order to give a better idea.

First of all you have to realize that wireless networks (by default) should never be considered secure. Most manufacturers make the wireless access points and routers unsecure, allowing home users to get started and on their network with the greatest ease. Any router you buy at the local big box store is going to be preconfigured for open, unsecure access to your network. Most of the time the username and password are “admin”, “password”, or some thing very close. The IP of the router is many times 192.168.1.1, or 10.0.X.X. Once you get the router home, change the password! You will also want to update the firmware on the router if it is old, the manufacturers update the firmware to fix bugs, and patch security holes.
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I am not able to run cabling through the walls and floors at my house (my parents frown at me cutting holes in the walls and stringing cable from room to room). Because of this, I use wireless networking. I have a WRT54G v4 router (using DD-WRT)located at one end of the house (Windstream would only allow me to install the DSL drop at the most useless location.) I need to have wireless access in the opposite side on the house, so I upgraded the antennas with 7dbi rubber ducks from Hyperlink Technologies. This greatly improved the signal through the house but my Powerbook still has a weak signal. Thinking a little directionality would solve the problem I found the wave surfer, it is free and you just need some aluminum foil to put on the back of the reflector. Fit the reflector over the antenna and you have instant directional antennas.

On another note, I have been playing with Xen. It is a Hypervisor for virtualization, and will work with windows and Linux VMs. I have been using the Citrix XenServer Express version to test different setups. I have to say that I am impressed, the Xen software was easy to setup. I did have a problem with the install program not seeing the CD install media. A quick change to installing from a HTTP server fixed the problem and off I went. I was able to install Windows and Linux. I used CentOS 5.1 for the linux install, which popped up another bug (Feature?) in which I was installing the linux distro from an ISO image across a samba share. For some reason when installing the linux images the user logged into the samba share must have read and write permissions, even though the share is mounted as retinal. After fixing the permissions on the server the system started and installed centigrade. Now I have to learn if there are limitations and what, generally, can be done with Xen

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