wpa encryption of wireless network how to?

[Tim]

Tim:
>> Not broadcasting your SSID does *NOT* give you any security, in any way
>> whatsoever, it's a fallacy.  Hackers and nuisances can still mess with
>> you when you're not broadcasting it.  All that does is give you
>> networking problems to work around.

Bill Davidsen:
> I'm not sure I follow here, while a serious hacker probably has tools to 
> determine how to connect without knowing the SSID, it stops wannabes who 
> don't have some tool and are likely to continue on to something easier.

Read what I said again.  It's a COMPLETE FALLACY.  There is NO security
benefit WHATSOEVER in hiding the SSID.  It's zero worth, pointless, and
it makes people waste their time with this sort of crap:

> As for networking problems, a step approach certainly seems to avoid them.
> - using a dummy SSID, broadcast it and make a connection
> - stop broadcasting, reboot everything, make a connection
> - change the SSID at both ends, reboot everything, make a connection

People insist on doing stupid things like this, breaking networking,
then come up with daft extra steps to restore it.  When they should just
have done things properly, in the first place.

It's as stupid as believing that unscrewing the house numbers from the
front of your house magically protects you from being burgled.  Oh look,
they don't know that we're number seven.  They'll be less inclined to
burgle us...

It's a load of crap.  This is computing.  It's hard facts.  It's not
magic.  There's no place for superstitition.

>> Broadcast your SSID.

> I always believe that making every step of a possible intrusion as hard 
> as possible reduces the number of attempts at the next step.

It doesn't make it the slightest bit hard.  My computer find networks
without an SSID being broadcast.  They're harder to work out which is
the right network to use, only in as much as you've got to try them all
out one by one.  But they're listed, and selectable.

> Since I have a router which does WEP only, my connection to the firewall 
> accepts only packets to the OpenVPN server which handles the real 
> connections. Probably as secure as WPA and avoids having to update a few 
> old machines. Since non-trusted connections are used on the road, 
> OpenVPN is on every machine anyway.

Decent encryption and other traffic flow control techniques are the only
way to go (e.g. tunnelling, encrypted logon credentials, etc.).  Though
you have to be careful you don't fall into the trap of thinking that
only this device can talk to that device because you've used MAC or IP
filtering.  All of those things can be changed at will.

-- 
[tim at bigblack ~]$ uname -ipr
2.6.23.15-80.fc7 i686 i386

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