Tue, 10 Feb 2004

Redline Networks Install

I'm going to be replacing our 100mbps boxes with gigabit boxes this evening.

So far, im quite happy with them. They make everybody happy....and when everybody is happy, my company makes money.

Growth has been a steep diagonal line these last 6 months, so a bigger pipe is just what we need.

The best thing of all is that these boxes have cool red lights on them. People walk by my office and stare at the red lighting and powercoated casing. Redline could probably sell these boxes on the case alone....actually...i bet they are!

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Wed, 04 Feb 2004

Fun With Propagation Maps
After documenting signal strength every couple feet in my floor, I came up with this very interesting coverage map. It was hand interpolated from a massive array of signal levels.

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Fri, 30 Jan 2004

Fun with WiFi in the office
Well, i finally have a little bit of time to start playing with the Cisco 1200's that came in. My new WiFi roaming laptop showed up, and i had Observer (has a lot of 802.11 MAC capturing/decoding abilities as well as other packet capture facilities) and a Linksys A/B/G card installed. Its a pretty sweet setup, and I walked around the office in search of rouge access points yesterday. None were found, i guess people didnt like Casey the WiFi Policeman bitching people out :(

The second i turned on a Cisco 1200 to configure it, two people from down the office called me, giving me signal reports. Its like people are watching their laptops, waiting eagerly for this mystical corp wifi network to power up.

Im going to put three APs around the area, and do a more thorough survey. I need to make sure the spots I picked will cover this office seemlessly or not.

Observer doesnt seem to be reporting dBm, just some lousy percentage, so I think im going ot have to install netstumbler to supliment this $10k software package...rofl.

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Tue, 27 Jan 2004

Fun stuff with the 1200
I got a bunch of 1200s with the 802.11g module in at work, and cisco bothered to ship me the dipoles today. So i have been messing with these lately in the office.

Signal propagation is a little better than i remember in the office, im suspecting its the 100mW radio vs. the 30mW orinoco i used earlier.

I am getting a bit of signal leakage outside on the ground, somewhere around -85 to -95dBm, which means that someone with a laptop near the building (or a high gain antenna at a distance) can access our network. We are throwing this network on a leg off our border (public addresses, outgoing connections only, no access to corporate network). In order for people to access corp resources, they would simply VPN in to our VPN server located on our public segment. Anyone could jump on the WLAN if they wanted to, but with all the bandwidth available at our office, no one is particularly concerned. I'm going to need to remember to block outgoing 25 on the ACLs, just to prevent drive by spamming. I am going to put a BS WEP key on the APs, just to prevent accidental associations and people looking for drive-by easy-access. They could just go down to the next high rise and jump on NEC's network anyway...

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