August 2003
Beginner to intermediate
288 pages
6h 51m
English
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Understanding 802.11 Speak
In this section, I discuss some of the terminologies that you will often come across when you set up your wireless network.
WEP
By default, encryption is not enabled for wireless networks. Encryption is important because malicious hackers equipped with the necessary software can sniff the packets transmitted by the wireless network, thereby compromising your data. Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is a protocol used for encrypting packets on a wireless network. It uses a 64-bit (or 256-bit, depending on the equipment) shared key algorithm. Although it is far from perfect, WEP increases the protection of your data, but in doing so reduces your effective data rates.
Tip
Chapter 4 talks about WEP in more detail. More secure techniques used for securing wireless networks such as WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) and 802.1X are discussed there.
SSID
The Service Set Identifier (SSID) acts as a name for a wireless network. All devices participating in a particular wireless network must specify this SSID. The wireless devices will not be able to participate in this network if the SSID is not specified (or not stated correctly). For example, Linksys products use the default SSID “linksys” (D-Link products use “default”). If you are concerned about unauthorized users connecting to your access point, you should change this to something else and disable SSID broadcast in the access point’s configuration (see Chapter 4). This makes it harder for unauthorized users to find your ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.