security …

as detailed in earlier posts, we are the lucky owners of a shiny new Powerbook. We were previously the owners of an older Powerbook, and are still the owners of a wireless router, which was only used by said older Powerbook (henceforth known as OP).

the OP was so old that it couldn’t cope with new fangled WEPpery on wireless, so we had to configure up the router with a full huge long WEP key for security. All well and good, you’d think, yes?

but we forgot, and seemed not to have noted, what the WEP key was. And we forgot, and seemed not to have noted, what IP the router was on, so we couldn’t talk to it. And we have lost, or never had, the Mac CD for the router, and it’s not available for download.

no matter – we have the Windows CD, and so we fired up Virtual PC on the powerbook, and connected all the cables, and … it didn’t work.

so we installed and ran some Windows LAN Sniffer from that interweb thing, on one of Pete’s VMWare Windows installs, and found it, at .200 Iwhich is quite logical in our numbering system, now I come to think of it). And we fired a browser at it, and we have made a note of its location in our Wiki, and have changed the password to something easier to remember and type (but not the same as any of our other passwords as we will have to give this to people occasionally), and we have noted *that* in our (password protected) Wiki as well.

and let that be a lesson to you all.

[edit]
in further news, this messing about with the wireless has caused the wireless ethernet inkjet to stop working. I hate technology.

and then we found another wireless network in the street, named JJ, with a password. Got to be the new neighbours – I can’t believe anyone else here would have wireless.

4 thoughts on “security …”

  1. Mac, is your internal wiki run from one of your Macintoshes? And if so, what software are you using (anything OSX specific, or have you “simply” got MediaWiki running on your Apache installation)?

    I ask only because I’ve been mulling over the value of having a wiki for myself, somewhere that all the machines in the company can reah (and that I can, via password, reach from outside). Something ‘webvisible’ in which I can store ‘notes’ really. In the end my lack of understanding of the configuration/deployment of PHP, MySQL etc stopped me from progressing down the MediaWiki path.

    Cheers!

  2. It galls me, when I eventually come downstairs of an evening, that the signal strength from the wireless router over the road is much stronger than the one from mine.

    OK, it’s understandable given that ours is diagonally opposite in three dimesions from our lounge and is positioned within a foil-lined roofspace and that signal must travel through what was an external wall, but gah anyway.

Comments are closed.