  One down, one to go... and then some... Tonight I turned in one of two term papers due this quarter. He was looking for 12 pages but there was just no way I can put together that much on home network security without putting together 50 pages. This topic is either an essay or a book now that I think a little more about it than I did when I picked the topic.
I was in the middle of a fight with a Linksys 802.11b wireless router that wasn't performing as expected so the topic was fresh on my mind. The problem I was having with the router... Well, I could leave the thing wide open with all the default factory settings (read come and abuse me) and it worked flawlessly. But as soon as I started using WEP or WPA or MAC filtering I would have to reset the thing several times a day just to connect to it. No good. I called Linksys tech support a couple of times. It met my expectations... some non-technical phone jockey flipping through flow charts. No good.
I'm sure that type of "tech support" is fine for problems that are not related to a product failure or firmware flaw... but I wouldn't know from personal experience since I don't pick up the phone until it's at that level. Anyway, Linksys told me the router was bad and needed to be replaced. Since it was still under warranty I went through the RMA process and decided to have one cross shipped. At least that way I could still fight with what I had while I waited for the replacement. When the replacement finally arrived (2 days late) I was excited to be back up and running without problems.
That fire was quickly snuffed out by the flood of crap from the Linksys product line I was using. I had the thing plugged in for about 2 minutes before I started having problems. It now sits in a box or something... somewhere... I don't care... It doesn't work. Chuck it for all I care. Donate it to AmVets... tax deduction... yippie... how much is blue crap worth these days? I went to Circuit City and bought a 802.11g Microsoft router. I never thought I'd buy a MS router but it was a decent deal with decent features so I thought I'd try it.
It works very well... I set it up and only had one glitch... I had used channel 2 originally but it seems one of my cordless phones didn't play well on 2 so I moved it up to 11 and it hasn't missed a beat yet. There's only one thing I don't like about it... the web interface for configuration. It's ok but too Microsoft.
I think they should have built two interfaces... one for the everyday home user who wants a wizard for everything and a second for me and all the other geekoids who like to know exactly how everything is set up and change one little tiny piece of it for whatever reason.... Maybe in a firmware update... Maybe in a dream... 
