I use the Netgear MR814 802.11b Wireless access point and Router for my Comcast Connection. No problems and it's cheap

http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=...97&loc=101&sp=1

I get good signal out on my patio

 

No matter which Router you get enable 128bit WEP and turn MAC Address restrictions on! If you don't know what these are, google it!

Sure you can hack 128bit in 30min with VERY HEAVY traffic but in a residential area if someone's hangin out in MY front yard for 30 min. I'm gonna reach out and "touch" him with my "Glock" WiFi

 

WEP decreases the range and interferes with some IPSEC implementations. MAC addresses are easy enough to spoof .. who cares.

Personally I leave all of that off, have static IP's setup for those with whom I wish to share my data and route all traffic for everyone else (well port 80 anyway) to this page

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by steve c

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by flitcroft

 

I use Linksys...

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Gossamer

 

I just went for a D-link setup although its 802.11b turbo not the big G, CompUSA has a current sale router and a notebook card for $60 wasn't a bad deal.

 

I've used most of the major brands out there: Lucent, Linksys, D-Link, & Netgear. I have a Linksys WAP and had been recommending them to friends and clients until their G-series routers came out and I saw some very flaky connection issues (firmware upgrade did not help at the time) when connecting with 802.11b cards. As luck would have it, that unit got fried in an electrical surge and I replaced it with a D-link 614+ and an DWL-800AP range extender which works great. If you have a large property to cover and don't want to spend a lot of dough, I recommend the D-link units.

 

There are all sorts of aspect to security...

I've got the Netgear 814b also. No NIC cards yet since I already had the three PC's wired. When I find a cheap laptop NIC I'll pick it up for my work laptop.


Anyway, I had the two computers used by the kids crash and burn within a month of each other. I used the email log feature which emails the web access log each time it fills up. That way I could look back several weeks.

Apparently, 2 days before each crash some of the kids friends spent the night. At about 3AM, I guess he couldn't sleep and started surfing the web. He hit one of those "internet dialer" pop up adds. The software it loaded changed the home page to some porn site. For some reason none of the kids was willing to tell dear old dad that porn kept popping up on the computers. Within 2 days all available space was used up in the hard drives, the windows registry was empty and the c-drive wouldn't boot. I learned a lot about restoring windows in the next two weeks.

Then a thought occurred to me. Depending on the age of the subjects that were downloaded (automatically or by the teenage kids), I'd be up sh1t creek without a paddle if any of it was tracked to a computer in my house.

I've got the Netgear box set up to prevent web access after mid-night and all the PC's have passwords now. When I get a wireless NIC it will be fixed IP's for me and 128bit encryption.