Netgear "house wiring" Ethernet network

I need to connect my wife's mac laptop to our cable Internet. I have a pc at the modem. Maybe I'm a bit paranoid, but a wireless router concerns me, even with encryption. So I'm looking at these, a Netgear product (belkin, others also make them) that basically turns your house wiring into an Ethernet LAN:

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A set of 2 (what I'd need for a connection to my wife's laptop in her office) is about 100 bucks, adding a router takes the total to ~$150. Once set, the "transmitter" is plugged in to a wall outlet at the router, then the "receiver" can by plugged into any house electrical outlet & you have an Ethernet jack (though presumably the outlets must be on eht same side of the 120 line?) I do have a concern though regarding whether or not our signal might be propagated over the local power grid to other homes in the area. Also, the device operates at 4 to 20 mhz. I'm guessing at these frequencies, house wiring is not a very effective radiator, but is it possible the signals may be broadcast under the right conditions?

TIA

Dan

Reply to
Dan
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Do you know that you can use most wireless routers as wired routers also?

I don't know of any wireless router that doesn't but I do have a Netgear which have four wired ports. It comes out of the box with the wireless capability disabled. To activate it, you have to go into its settings by using a web browser from a connected PC.

Reply to
amuskratt

No, I didn't know that, but it's a useful bit of information. I need to get a router in any case, and this way my options would be open. Do you recommend any particular make/model? I have 8 meg cable internet.

Thanks for the reply!

Dan

Reply to
Dan

Ugh! I don't know about you, but trying to get a 20 MHz signal cleanly propagated around my house using the 110 V wiring would scare the hell out of me. Not that I think it would be fire hazard or anything like that...I'd just be skeptical of it working right out of the box. Having dabbled in X-10 a bit, and seeing how ordinary, otherwise-innocuous-seeming appliances can destroy X-10 signals (which, I believe, are at a frequency much lower than the 4-20 MHz range...does that make them easier or harder to deal with in this situation?), I'd be very impressed if this stuff worked right out of the box in all situations. My own experience is that most of the larger appliances in my home always seemed to have some sort of internal AC filter or surge suppressor or some kind of other protection device, which goes unnoticed as far as normal 110VAC is concerned, but screws up other signals in a big way. I've had to purchased an X-10 signal indicator for troubleshooting, various X-10 filters, repeaters, etc., just to get a few lights to turn on and off with an acceptable level of reliability. Way over the cost of the devices themselves, I should add. Running a modulated Ethernet in this same environment sounds hairy.

Definitely do some research on this one...and let us know how you make out!

Using existing wiring for Ethernet is a tempting choice...but I'd try to find out more about how it will play with existing stuff plugged into outlets

Reply to
Mr. Land

I agree, you are paranoid. I have two PCs (both wireless) and two Macs (1 wireless and 1 Ethernet) served by a wireless router with 64 bit encryption, and don't have any problems, nor do I expect any. I'm using an Airport Extreme, which makes it simple for all to share a USB printer located near the base station. Wireless would permit your wife to be just about anywhere in your house or outside with the laptop, without dragging a cable.

Don

Reply to
Don Bowey

Don Bowey spake thus:

So just how hard is it for a determined hacker to get past those barriers? Anyone know for sure (no speculation, pleeze)?

--
The only reason corrupt Republicans rule the roost in Washington
is because the corrupt Democrats can't muster any viable opposition.
Reply to
David Nebenzahl

Heh, heh. I suppose so...

Reply to
Mr. Land

I haven't tried those but they may well not be any more secure than a wireless setup.

What you can do though is place the wireless portion on a different subnet which gives you one more line of defense. There's custom firmwares available for popular hacker-friendly routers like the Linksys WRT-54GS which allow you to do this, or you could use an IP-Cop or Smoothwall based PC router and plug a wireless router into the DMZ port.

Reply to
James Sweet

It doesn't hurt to be a little paranoid. A while back I was running 64 bit WEP encryption and just for fun I downloaded a few freely available script-kiddie type hacking tools and was able to break into my network in about 20 minutes. Now I run 128 bit WEP along with MAC adress filtering and it's quite a bit more secure. At any given time I can usually see 2-3 other wireless networks from my house, amazingly about half of them have no encryption at all.

Reply to
James Sweet

As I stated in another post, pretty easy.

Use 128 bit encryption, enable MAC filtering, and turn *off* SSID broadcast on the router, that will make it very unlikely for someone to stumble upon your network, though you will have to manually supply the SSID and the key to each client machine you use and the MAC address of each client to the router.

Reply to
James Sweet

The newer and preferred protocol is WPA-PSK encryption. With this much stronger encryption, the key is rotated at user-defined intervals, so even in the unlikely event someone hacked your network, they couldn't use it for longer than your rekey interval before they'd have to figure out the new key, ad infinitum:

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Broadband hijackers don't enjoy being cut off frequently, so they'll look for less secure setups.

You can and should use MAC address filtering. But this isn't perfect, as MAC's can be forged:

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Reply to
Ray L. Volts

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