If you decide to go with wireless for your home networking needs, make sure you secure your home network against intrusion. Many wireless networks are automatically set up so that someone with a wireless card could come by your house--or live next door--and access your home network and the Internet using your connection. To ensure that your data is safe and your network bandwidth isn't compromised from the outside, you can do a couple of simple things.

First, make sure your wireless access point isn't broadcasting its service set identifier (SSID), which will prevent most cards from even finding your network. Then, harden your network from the outside by hard-coding the Media Access Control (MAC) addresses of your wireless cards into the management software for your access point, so that only your machines can use the network. Be sure to use 128-bit encryption, if possible, and if you're using a bridged network, with wireless and wired components, consider keeping them separate so that machines on the wireless network can't access resources on the wired one.

Also, be sure that you've got the latest firmware update for your wireless access point; many companies, such as Apple, Linksys, and others, have shipped crucial security updates for their hardware.

When you configure them properly, wireless networks work through a NIC's media access control (MAC) address. This setup makes any network secure because the wireless hub recognizes only registered NICs. However, I've seen wireless networks configured to work on other cards a practice that puts network security at risk.



Configuring your network to use a MAC address is quick and easy. Take the time to set up your wireless network properly. When you do, the only disadvantage of such networks is transfer speed: The maximum speed of 11Mbps is slow by modern standards. Hence, wireless networks are best suited for home networks which, by the way, usually suffer from lax setup standards.

We know of one product that provides all the functions you want. (Whether you should entrust all these functions to one unit is another matter and depends on how crucial connectivity is for your remote office.) Filanet's InterJak 200 is an Internet service appliance that provides two USB and two FireWire ports for file and print sharing, DHCP server services, Network Address Translation (NAT), and a firewall with as many as 50 filters. The appliance also offers an optional VPN that uses PPTP or 56-bit Data Encryption Standard (DES) or 168-bit Triple DES (3DES) IP Security (IPSec). For file sharing, you can attach supported drives to InterJak 200's USB or FireWire ports. The product runs Linux and uses Samba for interoperability with Microsoft OSs, so both Microsoft and UNIX systems can connect to the appliance. (In this regard, the product is similar to some of the increasingly popular low-end Network Attached Storage?AS?ervers.) Filanet claims to support "almost any USB printer." You can view a sample list of compatible printers at the vendor's Web site.(http://www.filanet.com/)

InterJak 200 comes with two Ethernet ports: one to connect to the WAN and one to connect to your LAN. The product also supports several USB cable modems and Digital Subscriber Lines (DSLs) for WAN connectivity. At a street price of about $650, the appliance seems like a great little gadget for the small or remote office.

The main difference between access points and wireless routers is that wireless routers have more built in functions, like DHCP, NAT, Virtual IP and some even have a firewall.

The manufactures want to push wireless routers more than access points, and therefore they seem to be cheaper right now. This might change in the future.

Securepoint is a very good choise. see our solution page for detail.

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This is true. It is a way to make your 'enemy' receive a lot of emails (millions!) and also hurt his reputation at the same time. It is mostly used for political reasons as supposed to for monetary purposes. Wikipedia does a great job at explaining what a Joe Job is. Click here to find out more.