wifi question

On 20/12/2014 22:38, Roderick Stewart wrote:
On Sat, 20 Dec 2014 14:05:15 +0100, Martin wrote:

Use a wifi repeater/amplifier in a house
where walls etc. reduce signal. Price from about £12 (Aldi) to £35 for a really
good one.

Wireless repeaters will only give half the available local speed at
best. If this is an issue, an ethernet or powerline extension to
another access point is the way to go.

Including extensions in every room and all over the garden?

You may be able to effect a worthwhile improvement with one cable
extension to one strategically placed wireless access point. Wherever
you place it, a wireless access point fed with a cable will give a
better performance than a wireless access point fed by wireless, which
is effectively what a repeater is.

I don't have a performance problem when using a repeater.

Try a speed test while connected wirelessly to the main router, then
try it again while connected wirelessly to the repeater.

Rod.


You may not see any reduction in internet speed if your internet
connection isn't as fast as you WiFi, which is the norm with ADSL.

But if you have VDSL or test local access to a local media server or
something on your LAN you'll probably see a difference.

--

Brian Gregory (in the UK).
To email me please remove all the letter vee from my email address.

On 20/12/2014 14:50, Johny B Good wrote:
On Sat, 20 Dec 2014 13:19:28 +0000, Johny B Good
wrote:

On Fri, 19 Dec 2014 13:34:34 +0000, Roderick Stewart
wrote:

On Fri, 19 Dec 2014 10:13:49 +0100, Martin wrote:

Two out of the six nearest wifi have no security. How do you identify the
location of the house with no security?

Log in and set security yourself, then see who comes asking for help.


A properly designed wireless router should make it totally impossible
under _any_ circumstance for a wirelessly connected user to gain admin
access in order to do just as you've suggested but ISTR seeing just
such a monumental piece of stupidity demonstrated by at least one
model of WiFi enabled router.

It'll be interesting to see how Martin gets on if he tries your
suggestion. :-)

I wonder if anyone's keeping a black list of such 'security
braindead' WiFi routers available for inspection anywhere on the 'net?

I've just had a quick google but didn't find any obvious reference to
"Allowing admin via wifi is a "Bad Idea"(tm)" type result, just vague
hints that some models do indeed permit such stupidity (along with
frequent references to the infamous and ever growing list of UPnP
security flaws).

Apropo of checking the UPnP settings on my VM Superhub, it turns out
_not_ to be a good idea to ratchet up the Firewall protection above
the 'Low' setting if you want to remain in contact with VM's news
server :-(

Also, not a good idea if you want to retain the ability to ping
internet servers. Both the High and the Medium settings kill off ICMP
reulting in 100% packet loss whenever trying internet server addresses
such as those good old standbys of 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 (google's DNS
server addresses).

Hopefully, any VM cable broadband customers who chat to a tech
support guy over the sudden spate of error 400 codes from
news.virginmedia.com will now be asked whether they changed the VM
superhub's firewall settings recently and advised to make sure the
protection is set to 'Low'. :-)


Only a toy firewall has a setting called 'low'.

A real firewall lets you choose ports and destination IPs to allow or
block according to the rules you want.

--

Brian Gregory (in the UK).
To email me please remove all the letter vee from my email address.

In message , Johny B Good
writes

There's something to be said for totally eschewing spell chuckers
altogether. At least the mistakes and typos are all your own work. :-)

Are you seriously expecting me to be able to spell words like
'eschewing' correctly?
--
Ian

Ian Jackson wrote:
In message , Johny B Good
writes

There's something to be said for totally eschewing spell chuckers
altogether. At least the mistakes and typos are all your own work. :-)

Are you seriously expecting me to be able to spell words like
'eschewing' correctly?

Or to know what it means?

Bill

On Sun, 21 Dec 2014 12:49:17 +0000, Brian Gregory
wrote:

Use a wifi repeater/amplifier in a house
where walls etc. reduce signal. Price from about £12 (Aldi) to £35 for a really
good one.

Wireless repeaters will only give half the available local speed at
best. If this is an issue, an ethernet or powerline extension to
another access point is the way to go.

Including extensions in every room and all over the garden?

You may be able to effect a worthwhile improvement with one cable
extension to one strategically placed wireless access point. Wherever
you place it, a wireless access point fed with a cable will give a
better performance than a wireless access point fed by wireless, which
is effectively what a repeater is.

I don't have a performance problem when using a repeater.

Try a speed test while connected wirelessly to the main router, then
try it again while connected wirelessly to the repeater.

Rod.


You may not see any reduction in internet speed if your internet
connection isn't as fast as you WiFi, which is the norm with ADSL.

But if you have VDSL or test local access to a local media server or
something on your LAN you'll probably see a difference.

In an installation near here with an ADSL d/s speed of about 12Mb/s, I
measured about 5Mb/s while connected to a wireless repeater, but the
full speed when connected to the router, using a laptop and moving it
close to each device for the tests.

The repeater was of a type that could also be configured as an access
point, so I did that and fed it from the router by ethernet through
homeplug/powerline devices, and the speed went up to the full 12Mb/s
as if from the router itself.

I'm not sure of the exact mechanism but I've seen it described as the
wireless repeater having to perform twice as many transactions for
each packet, because it has to receive and then transmit in both
directions, hence half the speed. Whatever the proper explanation,
that's what happens in practice.

Rod.

On Sun, 21 Dec 2014 13:22:18 +0000, Bill Wright
wrote:

Ian Jackson wrote:
In message , Johny B Good
writes

There's something to be said for totally eschewing spell chuckers
altogether. At least the mistakes and typos are all your own work. :-)

Are you seriously expecting me to be able to spell words like
'eschewing' correctly?

Or to know what it means?


As I was about to suggest to Ian, you can always 'cheat' and google
the word for both spelling _and_ meaning as I did just now to double
check. That's how I usually deal with words I think I might have
spelled incorrectly. :-)
--
J B Good

On Sun, 21 Dec 2014 16:25:02 +0000, Johny B Good
wrote:

There's something to be said for totally eschewing spell chuckers
altogether. At least the mistakes and typos are all your own work. :-)

Are you seriously expecting me to be able to spell words like
'eschewing' correctly?

Or to know what it means?


As I was about to suggest to Ian, you can always 'cheat' and google
the word for both spelling _and_ meaning as I did just now to double
check. That's how I usually deal with words I think I might have
spelled incorrectly. :-)

I use the Oxford English Dictionary. I have various versions of the
actual book, but normally use the computer versions because they're
much faster.

I only have the spellchecker switched on in the wordprocessor to the
extent of putting those little wavy lines under anything it doesn't
recognise, so that catches my eye and then I can decide whether it's
what I meant or not. I'd certainly never let the computer alter
anything without my permission - that's the first thing I switch off.

The way to learn how to spell lots of words is to read lots of books.

Rod.

On 21/12/2014 00:09, Max Demian wrote:
"Johny B Good" wrote in message
...


My Belkin allows admin login via Wife for a start. And the Wife was enabled
by default with no password when I got it. The manual only tells you to set
up security *after* you have got the Wife working, so if you don't have any
Wife devices I suppose you would leave it unsecured. Disabling Wife is
buried in the router setup screens somewhere.


Both my Netgear and Billion routers allow admin over Wi-fi

--
mailto: news {at} admac {dot] myzen {dot} co {dot} uk

In message , Roderick
Stewart writes
On Sun, 21 Dec 2014 16:25:02 +0000, Johny B Good
wrote:

There's something to be said for totally eschewing spell chuckers
altogether. At least the mistakes and typos are all your own work. :-)

Are you seriously expecting me to be able to spell words like
'eschewing' correctly?

Or to know what it means?


As I was about to suggest to Ian, you can always 'cheat' and google
the word for both spelling _and_ meaning as I did just now to double
check. That's how I usually deal with words I think I might have
spelled incorrectly. :-)

I use the Oxford English Dictionary. I have various versions of the
actual book, but normally use the computer versions because they're
much faster.

I only have the spellchecker switched on in the wordprocessor to the
extent of putting those little wavy lines under anything it doesn't
recognise, so that catches my eye and then I can decide whether it's
what I meant or not. I'd certainly never let the computer alter
anything without my permission - that's the first thing I switch off.

The way to learn how to spell lots of words is to read lots of books.

Outgoing emails and news posts are spellchecked as I type. However, my
spelling is often so outrageous and way off the mark that no alternative
is suggested, Fortunately, Google seems to be much more forgiving, and
rarely fails to come up with a "Did you really mean ,,,?".
--
Ian

On Sun, 21 Dec 2014 21:40:49 +0000, Roderick Stewart
wrote:

On Sun, 21 Dec 2014 16:25:02 +0000, Johny B Good
wrote:

There's something to be said for totally eschewing spell chuckers
altogether. At least the mistakes and typos are all your own work. :-)

Are you seriously expecting me to be able to spell words like
'eschewing' correctly?

Or to know what it means?


As I was about to suggest to Ian, you can always 'cheat' and google
the word for both spelling _and_ meaning as I did just now to double
check. That's how I usually deal with words I think I might have
spelled incorrectly. :-)

I use the Oxford English Dictionary. I have various versions of the
actual book, but normally use the computer versions because they're
much faster.

I only have the spellchecker switched on in the wordprocessor to the
extent of putting those little wavy lines under anything it doesn't
recognise, so that catches my eye and then I can decide whether it's
what I meant or not. I'd certainly never let the computer alter
anything without my permission - that's the first thing I switch off.

That's the best way to use the built in spell checker, just let it
highlight the suspect spellings. Even so, I find it highlighting items
for which no dictionary can know the correct answer, typically
acronyms, so I tend to disable even this modest form of assistance to
rid myself of this annoyance.


The way to learn how to spell lots of words is to read lots of books.


Agreed! That's how I learnt my 'spellings' . You can't really learn
without the 'lesson' requiring some modicum of effort on your part
being applied.

Even allowing a spell checker to simply highlight suspect spellings
weakens the learning process compared to actually _proof_reading_ your
own work before hitting the send button. The absence of the spell
checking feature in this free version of Forte Agent (aka FreeAgent)
is actually a 'bonus feature' afaiac. :-)
--
J B Good