Got wife a notebook. Got router. Got it hooked up and everything is runnin fine. My router is a linsky, 49$ one. Not expecting much, its just for her to surf net at home. I got virus protection and all that, but with wireless internet at home or home network, what should I be worried about?
Your primary concern is going to be people logging into, and on to, your router. This is bad because: 1) Other people can connect to your wireless connection, and use your bandwidth to download massive amounts of data, which in turn could put you over your bandwidth limit for your ISP. 2) People connecting to your wireless connection is a huge privacy and security risk. 3) If they can log ON TO your router, they can change settings around and everything and make it so you can't get access but THEY can. (You would have to reset the settings from the router itself, and reconfiguring everything sucks.) So what you need to do: CHANGE DEFAULT USERNAME/PASSWORD FOR ROUTER REMOTE ACCESS: Once your router is setup, and a host is connected to it, open a browser on the host and go to the address 192.168.1.1 Enter your username and password. The username should be admin, and the password is not set yet. Try putting admin as the password if it makes you put one in. Navigating around in the routers firmware, locate the password setting for the router. Change it to something you will remember, and then apply the changes. ENABLE WIRELESS SECURITY: This will make it so unauthorized users cannot use your internet connection. Log into your routers firmware like you did before, entering 192.168.1.1 in the browsers location bar. Look for WEP Settings in your routers firmware, and enable it. This makes your wireless connection require a WEP Key to connect to it. To set the key, look for a button or menu that says something about WEP Key Setting. On my Linksys firmware, it's a button. When I click it, a box pops up and you enter a passphrase in a text box, and then hit a "generate" button. I entered a five letter word, and it generated four WEP keys. Write down the first WEP key. WEP should be enabled now in your routers firmware. Now try to connect from your wife's laptop. Look for the wireless network you have, it should be "secure" or have a lock on it now. Double-click to connect, and a box will pop up asking for your key. Enter the first key that was generated. (Your wep key should look similar to these: A520576806, EB6FFBFE2F) My directions are probably a little confusing because I'm sure our firmware is completely different from each other, but hopefully you get the basic idea and can do it. Good luck.
Thanx for ur help and I will try do everything u said, but, in order 4 someone to log on to my router, wouldn't they need to be sitting on my front porch?
They would need to be in RANGE of your router, which could possibly be your next door neighbors, or a car parked in the street.
