Tag Archives: MAC address

more wireless fun

Computer Aid Posted on by

A client has new latop & needs to get it working on his home network.

Since I’ve dealt with him before, I know he has a fully wireless computer network.

I check the laptop settings & it all seems ok, but still no connection… it can see the WAP, but it won’t connect to it, won’t get an IP address & won’t ping anything. An “ipconfig /all” shows the wireless adapter as being disconnected. I know the WEP password is correct, as I’ve previously setup another wireless computer in this household.

I start looking at the wireless access point (via its web interface, through another computer) & in wandering through the WAP menus, I come across the MAC filter menu.

It has MAC filtering switched on.

MAC filtering is a very good idea, as another computer won’t be able to sneak onto the network, even if it uses the correct password the only way to get around this level of security is to know the wireless password & to hack a wireless card to use the same MAC address as an existing card (highly difficult, and can cause conflicts the original card). It would be easier to break into the house, access the WAP, & add the MAC of a new card… But then if you got physical access to the WAP, you wouldn’t need to hack the network. 8-

Anyway, the WAP has a list of 4 MAC addresses, so I add the MAC address of the new laptops wireless network adapter, and then everything starts working.

Another job well done.

Caddies

Computer Aid Posted on by

A small business customer has a computer with 3 hard disk caddies… but doesn’t use them for backups, instead, they are used as 3 seperate “systems”… 1 is windows 98, the other 2 are winXP. They also have a new laptop that they need configured (they already managed to setup the wireless, so I’ll check the wireless security & find out why some of the other “caddy” systems won’t work correctly).

I setup WPA-PSK security with a nice long passphrase & activate MAC address filtering. I also setup antivirus & antispyware on the laptop. The main PC needs a lot more work, so I take it to the office & work on all the 3 caddies (its like working on 3 seperate computers, so it takes a lot longer).

I ask why have seperate caddies, as it could cause problems (eg email split amongst caddies), but customer also uses the caddies on another system (located elsewhere), so I guess thats ok.

Anyway, all is fixed, spyware is removed, and customer is happy (except for the internet, which suddenly stopped working as I delivered the system… It might seem like a strange coincidence, but it turned out to be an ISP problem, which got resolved many days later).