Well, this has at least been an interesting night in Markel computer-land. I’ll try to make a (somewhat) long story short.
Amanda and I chose recently to give up our in-home broadband to try and save ourselves a decent amount of money - something that was no small decision in our home, since we both use the Internet multiple times per day. We’re both e-mail junkies, and have our own daily Internet reading preferences, and whatnot. So anyway - BIG DEAL for us.
We live in the vicarage house, which is not all that far away from the church - one door down, across what is now a vacant lot. I’m not sure what the distance is, but I know it’s faily decent for what I was trying to do - we have a wireless router in the church office. We don’t use the wireless capability very much, but it’s there in case our staff wants to start using laptops, or we need to place a workstation somewhere we don’t have a hardwire. Overall, it’s very useful.
So I figured I could see if the claims on the range of 802.11 were a little conservative. I grabbed one of the USB adapters from work, and nabbed the drivers disk from the cabinet, and proceeded to set up the little Linksys adapter on my box at home. Everything installed fine; it’s up and running.
I didn’t think I’d get an active signal; since I’m pretty far away from the church, when all is said and done.
Imagine my surprise when the little green blinkie LINK light starts going off.
The real goofy thing is that I swore I didn’t remember the correct SSID for the router at church (I simply guessed and hoped it came out right). I get a dialog saying that it’s detected a WAP with the SSID “linksys,” which is the default for the router we have. I figured I’d messed up - or someone had reset the router - and it was set back to the default.
But then I remembered that I had set it to NOT broadcast its SSID to the entire universe, but instead to keep everything a secret and remain on a “don’t ask, don’t tell” basis.
So, out of curiosity, I connect to 192.168.1.1 - the default address for the router. A username and password dialog popped up.
I typed in the default username and password for the router model, which no one had ever changed at work (I’m doing so tomorrow after this). Got access; started looking around at settings. I found several problems. No static IP. Broadcasting the default SSID. No encryption. Only one other DHCP client. I looked a little closer.
I checked the access logs and DHCP tables, and found only one other computer on the WAN - and it wasn’t an office computer.
The light bulb clicked on -
One of our neighbors has a Linksys router, broadcasting default SSID, that’s not by any stretch of the imagination secured. I’m leeching a connection off either one of the homes behind our house, or the dentist’s office directly next door (my wife’s bet is on the dentist; I’m inclined to agree).
Check me out - I’m a bandwidth pirate.
Arrrrrrrrgh.
Needless to say, I’m going to bring home from church tomorrow the SSID for the network there, and try to connect to it that afternoon. If I’m picking up a carrier from one of the neighbor’s houses, then the range on these bad boys is SERIOUSLY underestimated. If I’m getting it from the dentist’s office, then I think there’s hope yet on getting it from the church office - even though it is painfully slow as most of the pages I load are evaporating into thin air on their way over to my house.
So the nerd schedule for tomorrow is:
1. Secure our router a little more.
2. Get off the neighbor’s router.
3. Try to get on the church’s router.
I’ll try and figure out what kind of distance we’re talking about on this one. I might even go over to the dentist’s office and see if they’re the ones with the wireless, just out of curiosity. Maybe I’ll even offer to secure their network a little.
Who knows - they might appreciate the offer.
