Linksys wireless networking

From: B. Joshua Rosen (bjrosen@polybus.com)
Date: 04/06/02 

From: "B. Joshua Rosen" <bjrosen@polybus.com>
Date: Sat, 06 Apr 2002 09:59:13 -0500

I've just suffered the indignity of having my system hacked, or at least
being accused of having it hacked. That was another thread but I'll recap
here, my DSL provider received a complaint from a bank claiming that they
were being portscanned from my IP address. I ran chkrootkit on all of my
systems as well as doing an RPM verify and checking the logs and I didn't
find anything so I suspect that the portscan didn't really eminate from
my system. However to be on the safe side I'm going to add a hardware
firewall to my system. Two kill two birds with one stone I'm thinking
about getting the Linksys BEFW11S4 Wireless AP + Cable/DSL Router w/4-Port
Switch. I have several questions about Linux compatibility, functionality
and security (thus the cross posting).

1) How well do the Linux drivers for Linksys WPC11 PCMCIA card work. This
card isn't supported in the standard kernel but I found drivers at

http://people.ssh.com/jkm/Prism2/

I was able to compile and install those drivers so I know that at least
that amount works. Does anyone have any experience with this card, is
there anything else that I'm going to need? My laptop is a Dell Inspiron
5000 running Redhat 7.2 with a 2.4.18 kernel.

2) Is 128 bit encryption supported in Linux?

3) I've never used wireless so this may seem like a naive question, but
how do you set up the client system so that the encryption works? The
router looks easy, there is a web interface where you give it a pass
phrase that it uses to generate the encryption key. I assume that you
have to do the same thing for the client, what's the mechanism to do
this? is there a Redhat control panel or a Webmin interface?

4) How do you keep passers by off of the network? I assume that the
router will ignore all unencrypted traffic, is that right?

5) I need a secure shell server on at least one of my systems, is it
easy to set up the router to pass SSH traffic to one of my machines, can
I set it up to pass different port numbers to different machines?

6) How secure is a wireless system? There is a choice of the standard 64
bit encryption and 128 bit, how insecure is the 64 bit?, how much of a
performance hit does using 128 bit encryption cause?

Thanks,

Josh

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Anybody running pre-N WiFi ?
    ... I'm trying to decide whether to replace it with another cheap-ish 802.11g router or to splash out on pre-N gear. ... the pcmica card is windows only as far as i can tell from having a poke ... to only have windows drivers thus the bundle is less useful assuming you ...
    (uk.comp.sys.mac)
  • Re: Linksys wireless networking
    ... > 1) How well do the Linux drivers for Linksys WPC11 PCMCIA card work. ... > 2) Is 128 bit encryption supported in Linux? ...
    (comp.os.linux.security)
  • Re: Anybody running pre-N WiFi ?
    ... - this bundle costs about the same as the same router on its own. ... the pcmica card is windows only as far as i can tell from having a poke ... to only have windows drivers thus the bundle is less useful assuming you ...
    (uk.comp.sys.mac)
  • Re: no network after mthrbrd install
    ... Log into the router from a different machine, does it see the connection to ... > I also re installed the driver for the wireless card, ... That's referring to the drivers for your ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: wireless connection
    ... it's the Windows drivers. ... The vendor really doesn't care if the card works for you or not with ... One thing I should add is that I use exclusively 128-bit WEP encryption. ... vendor or check their site. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)