Router Trials and Errors

The loss of networking equipment in our house is a very grave matter. Five agonizing internet-less days are finally behind me as we received the high powered wireless router on Thursday. Friday evening was spent in the warm glow of the monitor, networking! Which is not so different from most weekend nights, but that is none of your business.

I am dramatizing a little bit. We weren’t completely without the Interweb. When the router went down ‘the help’ (aka – my husband) bypassed it by connecting our primary computer directly into the cable modem. Unfortunately this left the other computers - the home theater PC, the home recording PC, the token Macintosh and my laptop – SOL. My laptop was able to jump on a neighbor’s unsecured wireless network. (Shame on them!) It’s easy to plug-in and surf when it comes to routers, in fact that was just what I did.
First thing, I switched around the necessary cables to get the router powered and connected. Setting up a router is painless these days. All the inputs are color coded, for ease of use. Which is the really saddest thing; color coding is prevalent in anything technical such as wires, inputs and resistors. This is with complete disregard to the fact that 10% of men are color blind and .04% of women. This does, however, help to explain fashion sense and how I became a technician.

Back to the hookup! Connect the Ethernet or USB cable from the cable modem into the router. Plug in the power. Connect the Ethernet or USB cables from the router to the other computers. Turn off the cable modem for two minutes. Turn it back on. Turn off your computers. Turn them back on and thank goodness we have connection! Alright, time to look up color blindness statistics, and then maybe go to the park because I’m done... I am done, right?

Nope! Put down the dog leash because we still have work to do. First order of business is setting a password on your router. Even if your router has been hooked up for years, go make sure you have a password right now. While you’re looking up how to do this in your manual I’ll tell you why… I just heard a story of a particularly swarmy technician who was jumping on his neighbor’s wireless network. The neighbor was pretty savvy and checked to see who was on his network regularly. After discovering the freeloader the owner kicked him off. The not-so-nice techie knew the name of his router and it’s address. With this knowledge, he downloaded the user manual and logged onto the router. He immediately changed the password to lock out the owner. Note - not all technicians use their powers for good.

Now that you know, immediately change the SSID (service set identifier) because it is may be defaulted to your router model. Second, change the default router password. Third, setup a wireless security password. This requires every machine logs on to use the wireless network. For home use ‘WPA’ should be fine. If the computer logging seems to have trouble, refer to last week’s column on windows update. There is an update for wireless security.

Speaking of wireless security… There are entirely too many unsecured networks in the world. This is extremely unsafe. Any geek can jump on (for example: me, last week and the bad neighbor). Remember, you are responsible for what traffic takes place from your cable line. It only takes a moment to set the password, even if it’s the name of the family dog. Our security expert at work just felt a sharp jab in his back, but honestly, it’s better than nothing. For advanced security, make a list of mac addresses that are allowed access to your router. A ‘mac address’ is a unique number assigned to every network card. In your router settings you can see a list of mac addresses and computer names that have accessed your router. The list should only contain addresses from the computers in your house.

We noticed one other problem after our happy home was wireless again. The wireless mouse and keyboard for the home theater PC had become very difficult to use. No one wants to sit at the computer to play music and movies in their living room; that would be akin to changing the channel on the TV set. Preposterous! Instead we looked to the most recent technical addition in the house - the router. All wireless devices broadcast on a channel, much like radio. Apparently, the new super strong router was interfering with our mousing capabilities. This problem was easily resolved by changing the wireless channel. One tip - the new wireless channel should be at least five channels away from the other device. It may take some trial and error, but in the end it’s worth it.

Heather Hamilton, the Prima Data, lives by trial and error. Send her your trials, errors and questions to primadata@savannahnow.com.