I'm not going to jump on the criticism wagon, but perhaps there is an opportunity here for you to be a good neighbour?
Maybe you don't know where the leaky WiFi is based, but a laptop might narrow down the possibilities!
PoP
That's right. Maxie could beam himself over and sort it out.
Netstumbler....
The configuration utility of some of the better adaptor cards like Cisco have signal strength display capabilities.
Under some circumstances, a signal can be received quite a long way away.
For example, last summer I was sitting outside with my notebook doing some emails and noticed a Wifi signal appearing. I moved the notebook around a bit, until at a certain spot the signal and signal quality level were very high - almost as much as my own network. Moving half a metre in any direction dropped it considerably. There was no WEP set on it, so I decided to do exactly as you describe, find the neighbour and suggest he at least turned it on for what it was worth.
In the end I found that it was from a house about 50m away, and I went and saw the guy who was duly grateful and asked me to help him do the settings which I did.
It surprised me though, that the signal was so effective so far away. When I went back to my own back garden, the penny dropped. There was part of a sheet of Celotex propped against the fence (being used in my cabin project). The aluminium foil was acting as some kind of reflector. Moving it around caused the signal to vary.
.andy
To email, substitute .nospam with .gl
Yes, as far as WiFi goes, Celotex is best outside leaning against the fence rather than in the walls!
I saw an interesting survey the other day where someone had gone round a town centre and found that 60% of the business WiFi's detected had no security enabled, which does seem extraordinary.
Another point that might worry the unsecure WiFi owner (rather than a WiFi squatter in his system) is that any illegal/monitored downloads made by the squatter will be ascribed to the owner as they will have gone to his router.
(Yes, all right, I'm a new WiFi owner, having set it up this week and, before you ask, encryption is enabled).
They aren't the only ones. On Jan 9th I complained to Vispa that their news server wasn't functioning. I got the following reply and changed to individual.net.
Nick, Usenet is not a basic service, regardless of what you may think. It requires a *beep* of lot of bandwidth, resources, managing and time as long standing Vispa csutomers will know. We also provide this as a value added service, not a primary service.
However the server news.vispa.com is indeed playing up since Jan 6th. The software we used corrupted, folloing on from an issue in December which was patched. A reinstall was done, however it's complaining about the licenece, something I not repaired to spend a further $2500 when we aleady have a 5 year license. None of us can find a copy, so we await contact from the makers....the problem is they don't want to support a package which is 18 months old.
I thus am looking at using a new bit of software, however we have no ETA at present. This is simply down to lack of time by staff who are already involved in other projects (again many issued here), upgrades and customer service.
Martin Pitt - "The Management" Managing Director Vispa Internet Limited
Funnily enough, I can get a reasonable signal inside my garage, which in effect is lined with the stuff.
Easily. Not long ago on the way to visit a customer, I sat in the back of a taxi going from Waterloo to the City (via the West End) and had my laptop open with Netstumbler running, just to see what was out there. This tool lists Wifi networks and access points and shows whether WEP is enabled. I was just using a regular PCMCIA card in the notebook, no extra antennas etc. Everything was in pure listening mode - i.e. not associating into specific networks for access.
I found that well over half of the 20-odd networks that appeared, did not have WEP turned on, some just had the manufacturer's default SSID, others had the obvious names of government departments, companies and hospitals.
This can be deceptive though. It is quite common for people to leave WEP turned off and to use IPSec or other VPN approach to secure the connection.
If you transfer a lot of data, don't assume that WEP can't be broken. It is very weak.. The issue is more a practical one of can somebody get near enough to your network and can they be bothered.
.andy
To email, substitute .nospam with .gl
[stack overlflow: Warning: Software under pressure: Cue nonsensical stament]
Blimey. I built our first news servers out of freeware.
The alst one we built cots about 20 grand just for the disc pack alone, and near enough another 10-15 from memory on the CPU and memory.
Software was free (INN).
Sounds like VISPA are using some heap of expensive wombat turds on a NT platform. No wonder its crap.
Indeed. I do have WPA as well on the router but not on the laptop. The only ones who could get near without being noticed are the neighbours and I know both of them and that they aren't interested in WiFi networks.
Major data downloads are on the desktop machines which are ethernet connected to the router - I thought that was best, reserving the WiFi for the laptop access which is occasional.
Slightly more on topic, very satisfied with NTL cable broadband so far, their customer care appears to have improved out of all recognition, if not the quality with which they lay cable across the front garden.
Bob Mannix
It was certainly smileworthy at InfoSec earlier this week; from one end of Olympia to the other, there were at least 30 WiFi networks up and sending out their SSIDs - as heard by nothing more exotic than a Palm with its builtin WiFi software. Over half of them didn't have WEP turned on, though as Andy writes
Being a *good* attendee/exhibitor, I firmly resisted the temptation to Explore in any malicious way. But when sitting in on some of the less attention-grabbing presentations, it seemed only reasonable to catch up with The Register, Slashdot, and news.bbc.co.uk on such networks as were happy to proxy off into The Net At Large; belated thanks to whoever ran the net with the imaginative SSID of 'WIRELESS' ;-) And I imagine that the WEP passwords were chosen with convenience as a much higher priority than difficulty-of-guessing: I know for a fact that HP's was!
Just so. The tools to derive the WEP key, which is fixed until such time as the access-point administrator gets round to changing it again, are freely available, require no exotic hardware, and need a volume of data to chew on which an active network will provide within a few hours. WEP alone doesn't live up to its name ("Wired-Equivalent Privacy") - for the home user, you'd notice someone adding new wiring to your little Ethernet setup rather more easily than the next-door-neighbour-but-one - *and* anyone who has access to any malware-planted backdoors on said near- neighbour's machine! - leeching off your dialup or (more usefully to them) broadband link over the ever-so-forgiving airwaves...
Cheers, Stefek
Seems to work fine up here, plus get decent FM radio down the cable as a bonus. They have a 1 gig/day limit in the T&C which seems reasonable, but does not seem to kick in at all so must be a manual thing to deter bandwidth hogs.
For adsl Nildram is a good bet, very switched on people, a healthy company,
150 gig/month limit and they also provide AV & anti-spam with some accounts. Static IP & smtp are options. Not the very cheapest, but you pays yer money....In message , Toby writes of Ntl
Hmmm. I had to have my stb replaced after it died and the Ntl bod was
*very* unhappy that I'd connected my FM tuner up to their wall socket. He insisted on removing the cabling. :(
I have WPA enabled on both the router and the notebook ;) Since it's a D-Link router I also have "Super G" and "turbo" on and set to ignore 11b on both. This combination in itself seems to block everything but Atheros based cards, even without the security ;)
I have to admit that I've not had a problem with the actual NTL service, other than a drifting return path which took a little bit of persuasion to convince NTL of. They fixed it quickly enough though.
Lee
"dave @ stejonda" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@stejonda.freeuk.com:
Which is odd - as they tell you to ask the installers for a suitable FM wire - for free! Or they did when ours was done.
Plus speed being increased from 600 to 750 sometime in the summer. (Also
150 to 300 and 1000 to 1500.) Apart from the spam on (some) ntl mail accounts, crap news service, bizarre billing, poor support and Inktomi caches going sour from time to time - we are pretty happy with them. (That is not meant to be sarcastic - just an honest list of the problem areas. Certainly not as many problems as contacts have had with Tiscali, BT, etc.) You also get a near-static IP.
I've had the BT business ADSL service for a few years and it's been fine. It has died on a couple of occasions (always late Friday night of course, and been repaired first thing Saturday morning). BT seem to monitor it and have contacted me when they've seen excessive errors, even though I hadn't yet noticed any degredation. I have never failed to get the full download speed (although business service has a much lower contention ratio than residential service). It's not cheap -- the business service is quite a bit more than the residential service but if you use it for your business then you might find that worthwhile.
I only make use of the raw IP service -- I've never tried to use BT's mail, news, webpages or anything else, so I can't comment on that.
When it's a) warmer and b) not raining, I was going to have a wander and locate the signal
Whoever it is, they have left access open on purpose, his own machine is well enough protected, they're not an IMM numpty
In message , Bob Mannix writes
Good, I think I'll become a paedophile then ...
In message , Bob Mannix writes
I suppose I have to agree there, I just wish that their set top boxen worked for more than a few weeks without having to be reset every day
In message , Rod Hewitt writes
The guy said that the FM feed was part of their analogue service and was likely to be switched off in the near future. That was a few months ago so since yours is still active I think I'll reconnect it here. :)
(which seems disproportionately low compared to the other increases but is still welcome)
yeps - never seen that
I use individual.net
what's that?
haven't seen that problem for a while
yeps
In message , geoff writes
Get it [replaced*n] - I had to have that done uncountable times until I ended up with a battered 2000 model which works fine
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