It’s been a darn long time since I last blogged because I’ve been rather busy with university matters, army matters and a substantial amount of time is devoted to perfecting the art of dodging arrows. I’m still pretty lousy at it since I find myself compelled to be busy and to carry out my basic duties as far as possible.
I am blogging because I feel an urge to talk about my experience with fiddling with my wireless router. After being in signals for a while I figured out I should at least play around with my home router with whatever I learnt. It’s just securing the home network but somehow it is more fun when you apply things that are somehow related to your work back at home. My home network was freaking unsecured actually, and I’m absolutely aware of that. First I use the lousiest and the most basic encryption keys available for wireless networks, next I use the default SSID (and broadcast it as well); finally, I do not use any sort of filtering on my network. You pros out there must be quite sad you didn’t chance upon my network to leech upon but then again my router is a pathetic little wireless signal transmitter that cannot cover much area anyways.
So to cover up all the security flaws in the home network, I took some time to reconfigure it, changed the SSID (attempted with the disabling of broadcast but ultimately decided to turn it back on), changed the encryption system and finally, I added MAC address filtering which will totally shut any illegal users out from using the Internet through my line. I’m not going to be talking about how to do it, but in general, just try to figure out how to get those stuff done in order to step up network security, especially for wireless. A point to note is about securing console access. MAC address filtering is the most foolproof way of securing network to prevent people from stealing your Internet and the thing about it is that the only way for ‘hackers’ to get around this problem is to console into your router and turn off the MAC filtering. Therefore, you should disable the remote console access (ie. turn off the telnet port, which is Port 23) if it’s not necessary and for consumer-end routers where you don’t even know what I mean by ‘console into your router’, you could try changing your router IP to something besides the default one – I’m pretty sure the option is available on your web-based configuration panel. Finally, whether you can access the remote console or not, you should set a proper, decent, difficult-to-crack password for the configuration authentication.
After doing all that, you’ll start feeling rather accomplished because you just kept out the thousands of neighbours (especially when you are living in the new type of HDB flats with 40 storeys and you happen to be on the 21 floor, and the buildings are built so close to each other you can even access the wireless network of someone 2 blocks away plus you bought yourself a tough-looking router that sends out signal within a 500m spherical radius) who were previously leeching on your Internet without you knowing. How wonderful, now you can enjoy the full bandwidth of Internet you paid for.
On other matters, I got Kwang Guan to help me buy a EP-630 earphones from Comex. It’s not exactly much cheaper but those earphones are decent enough in terms of sound quality (I don’t quite agree with their claims of deep bass) and noise isolation. I think I’m planning to get earphone adapters though I haven’t quite figure out if I’m going to stick to Sony Ericsson after ORD.
