1 Channel is mundane. Better decide what you're going to put into ESSID. "Academy City" perhaps?

2 What program is this?

3

Pete, I already decided it's going to be "Railgun".

Mauser, it's "inSSIDer". (Look in the upper left corner.)

4 I've never seen this before and just installed it myself--thanks for showing it off!

Looks like I configured correctly with brute force experimentation--I share my part of the spectrum with only one other network and we don't frequency hop. And both of us avoid the saturated part, which is constantly changing.

Oddly enough, everybody seems to be using WPA in my area. I'd have expected some to use the old stuff.

5 I'm so grateful everything defaults to 1 or 6, 11 is almost always wide open. I have some equipment that can't do WPA or WPA2 (though I really don't use it much), so I use WEP mostly just to keep the neighbors out. A hacker would find that the really valuable traffic I have is all SSL-encrypted. I sort of wish I could run two APs on the same device, and have my non-WPA equipment run WEP (which is just streaming public video or playing online games) while my real computers run WPA2.

6 My situation is like Jeremy's. I've got a wireless printer that only speaks WEP. If it gets hacked, the two bad cases are (1) someone reads the PDFs I am printing, and (2) someone uses up the depressingly small paper tray. (Actually, worse would be print 100% black pages and use up my toner. Still not a tragedy.) My internet connection, OTOH, is wired or WPA2; I use two different routers. The printer gets the old router- neither high security nor high speed are necessary.

And I just looked up to confirm my memory- the standard XBox360 wireless adapter uses WEP. There must be millions of them in use. I wouldn't be surprised if the PS3 and Wii use similar wireless connectivity.

7

Video game consoles use Wifi to talk to their remote controllers?

I wonder how many of the hubs I see are video games?

8 (Um, ignore that. The Vendor column would sure show it.)

9 There is way more than meets the eye, and not just microwave. For example Bluetooth uses framing that deconflicts it with WiFi, but it's the same 2.4 GHz band. Any wireless mouse or Xbox controller are like that. So I would not obsess with the channel, it's not the whole picture.

10 Would the vendor column really show it? I think it might show the maker of the WiFi chipset, not necessarily the brand name on the consumer device.

As to the WiFi on gaming systems, I was talking about the adapter to connect the Xbox to the internet via a home router. I don't know what protocol the wireless controllers use. It could be WiFi, but it sure doesn't have to be, as they have no need for that much range. It's probably something proprietary, to make it harder for offbrand controller manufacturers. It still might use the 2.4 GHz band, though.

And thanks for the pointer to inSSIDer, it seems to be a very handy app.

11 My DLink router has automatic channel configuration.  If it detects too much interference on any one channel, it changes it, and the clients pick it up automatically.
Of course, the "engineers" who thought it would be a good idea to have most of the channels overlap so much that you only really have 3 channel choices instead of all 11 needs to be taken behind the woodshed...

12

Just for completeness, here's the link: inSSIDer

I turn Alcyone off when I'm not using it, but Arcturus (my torrent computer) runs 24 hours anyway. Last night I left inSSIDer running, and right now it says that it has seen a total of 18 hubs.

Neither of my machines have shown anyone using 5GHz, but I don't know if the reason is that my computers don't support that frequency. I would have hoped the program would say if they did not, but I can't find any indication of it.

I know that my hub (due tomorrow) does support 5GHz, and if my equipment did too it would be nice to use it. But I doubt that the iPaq supports it, so it's probably moot.

Arcturus is 5 years old, and was cheap then, so I have no doubt it doesn't do 5 GHz. but Alcyone is a cadillac, and is only a year old. I suppose I could google for the adaptor type, or look it up on Wikipedia.

Atheros AR928X...

13 I can't find anything official, but it looks like "not".

14 Well, my wireless router is perhaps 20 or 25 feet from my machine--it was inconvenient to run cable, so I went wireless--and my signal strength runs about -60 dB.  

15

I'm not even going to be that far away. Most of the time the slate and iPaq will be less than three feet from the hub. I might sometimes use the slate from my sofa, about 4 meters away.

I'm not really worried about signal strength.

16 Consoles use Wifi to talk to the internet. We can stream Netflix to all three of the modern ones, for instance. Unfortunately, at least the XBox 360 and the Wii only do WEP, as does my handheld Nintendo DS (which actually predates WPA2 for sure, and WPA1 too, I think, at least as an accepted standard, it probably doesn't have the horsepower for it anyhow). My Xbox360 is wired, but the Wii is way on the other side of the house.

The Wii uses a slightly hacked up Bluetooth protocol. A stock Bluetooth computer driver won't recognize a Wii controller as a device but it's not too hard to write a driver on the Bluetooth stack that can see it and read from it with only standard Bluetooth hardware. Looks like the PS3 controllers have the same story, but I can't confirm as I don't own one. (I actually did hook up the Wii controller to my machine once for giggles.) XBox controllers require a custom receiver. (Of course. Actually this is a bit odder than it sounds because the wired XBox controllers actually have the ability to use the controller on computers listed as a feature on the box, so it isn't necessarily Microsoft being reflexively closed. I am assuming that given all three consoles had to do something custom that the Bluetooth HID specification is somehow deficient for console gaming. Probably the accelerometers, if I had to guess.)

I'm probably doing wonderful things for this page's Google keywords here.

17

The DS only does WEP, correct.  The first ones went on sale around this time in 2004.  From Wikipedia's WPA page, "Because the changes required fewer modifications on the client than on the wireless access points (APs), most pre-2003 APs could not be upgraded to support WPA with TKIP."  The DS, which has a 67MHz ARM as it's primary CPU, might not have the horsepower, either, as suggested above.

I have an ancient D-Link wireless-B router at home I sometimes consider pressing into duty as a secondary access point just for the DS, to keep the latter on an isolated subnet.

 

18 Actually, reading farther on the DS article, the 33MHz ARM7 coprocessor handles Wi-Fi as well as sound.

19 ..and the DSi article says it supports WPA/WPA2, but only on DSi-specific titles (which I am not sure there are any of in the US yet.)

20 Wii definitely supports WPA-PSK with TKIP. Heck even my PSP does. The DS is a lost cause though.

21 Xbox 360 supports WPA, at least currently.  I switched from WEP to WPA about six months ago.

Wii. . . well, its *supposed* to support WPA, but ever since I switched from WEP, I've had the devil's time getting it to actually *work* properly.  Usually to get it to connect, I need to power cycle my router.  No clue why.