Internets
I just talked to Roy, one of the other students in this building and asked if/how much we agreed on for him using my Internet connection. Apparently, we didn't, but he grabbed his wallet and handed me $20. That's nearly half the monthly cost, so it's a pretty good deal.
What I'm hoping to do next quarter is share my 'Net connection with everybody I can and charge them $10 to $20 per month for it. If I can get that going with three people, it'd at least take care of most of the bill, in addition to being convenient for them since they don't have to deal with the application process or paying bills. Plus, it's pretty much instantaneous, instead of taking a month.
My room is in a particularly poor place to have the router, as it's on the end on the ground floor, which puts it in a corner.
If my router projected a perfect sphere of connectivity, a diagram of the rooms that it could cover would look something like the diagram at left. That's all well and good, except that it's losing over half of the area it can cover into the ground and outside. That's both wasteful and a security risk.
All that unused space on the outside is where people can walk by and use your Internet connection, like I was doing to other people, or more nefarious things, like snoop on your wireless network activity. Wi-fi security is not really great, with even the newer schemes being crackable in under an hour.
Now, unfortunately for my plan of sharing my Internet connection with other people, the router isn't actually set up like that. You usually don't need to be able to talk up for long distances, so they squish the sphere down, which gives it more reach to the sides, where it matters. In addition, the floors seem to be somewhat more difficult to penetrate than the walls.
In the end, my current coverage area looks roughly like second diagram at left. You might be able to get a spotty connection on the third floor, but I doubt you'd get anything useful.
Now, if I could just put Wi-Fi routers wherever I felt like, and could find a way to get one to radiate vertically effectively, I'd be able to lay out something like this next diagram. You could either chain the routers together with Ethernet, or use a Wi-Fi mirroring protocol I don't remember the name of.
Linking them together with Ethernet has the advantage of providing speed and reliability, but I'd have to convince the manager that he wants little blue cords dangling from one room to another. Simply linking the routers together wirelessly would be a little bit unreliable unless I stuck one in the middle to bridge them all. It would still be a lot less reliable than wiring 'em all up with magic blue strings. If the manager wanted to do it, he could sure make a pretty penny. It would take about $150 of new equipment, give or take.
Alternately, if I can convince people in a couple of rooms that they want to lend me a wall socket and some space, I might be able to rig this up, and it would pay for itself pretty quick if I could contact the people in those rooms.
Now, all of that said, it would require a significant amount of work on my part, so I'll probably just stick with diagram 2, which what I've got now.
What I'm hoping to do next quarter is share my 'Net connection with everybody I can and charge them $10 to $20 per month for it. If I can get that going with three people, it'd at least take care of most of the bill, in addition to being convenient for them since they don't have to deal with the application process or paying bills. Plus, it's pretty much instantaneous, instead of taking a month.
My room is in a particularly poor place to have the router, as it's on the end on the ground floor, which puts it in a corner.
If my router projected a perfect sphere of connectivity, a diagram of the rooms that it could cover would look something like the diagram at left. That's all well and good, except that it's losing over half of the area it can cover into the ground and outside. That's both wasteful and a security risk.All that unused space on the outside is where people can walk by and use your Internet connection, like I was doing to other people, or more nefarious things, like snoop on your wireless network activity. Wi-fi security is not really great, with even the newer schemes being crackable in under an hour.
Now, unfortunately for my plan of sharing my Internet connection with other people, the router isn't actually set up like that. You usually don't need to be able to talk up for long distances, so they squish the sphere down, which gives it more reach to the sides, where it matters. In addition, the floors seem to be somewhat more difficult to penetrate than the walls.In the end, my current coverage area looks roughly like second diagram at left. You might be able to get a spotty connection on the third floor, but I doubt you'd get anything useful.
Now, if I could just put Wi-Fi routers wherever I felt like, and could find a way to get one to radiate vertically effectively, I'd be able to lay out something like this next diagram. You could either chain the routers together with Ethernet, or use a Wi-Fi mirroring protocol I don't remember the name of.Linking them together with Ethernet has the advantage of providing speed and reliability, but I'd have to convince the manager that he wants little blue cords dangling from one room to another. Simply linking the routers together wirelessly would be a little bit unreliable unless I stuck one in the middle to bridge them all. It would still be a lot less reliable than wiring 'em all up with magic blue strings. If the manager wanted to do it, he could sure make a pretty penny. It would take about $150 of new equipment, give or take.
Alternately, if I can convince people in a couple of rooms that they want to lend me a wall socket and some space, I might be able to rig this up, and it would pay for itself pretty quick if I could contact the people in those rooms.Now, all of that said, it would require a significant amount of work on my part, so I'll probably just stick with diagram 2, which what I've got now.
posted by William at
8/05/2008 01:31:00 PM
8 Comments:
Does the place have false ceilings? Cause that stuff makes running wires unbelieveably easy. Also, the more people you have on your network the more likely you are to have usage spikes and slowdowns, and it only takes one person running torrents to ruin everyone's day. Or a few people playing online games.
Nah. I have a load-bearing room, so all the walls are concrete or some other kind of hard, un-thumbtack-able stuff.
There's only one fiber line coming into the building, and that one 100mbps connection is split between the whole building. The only difference between the normal way and my way is that I get the money for splitting it in the building instead of the the ISPs. The network already is largely useless from 7-9PM for anything beyond basic web browsing. They also seem to have a way of killing P2P during that time.
Nah. I have a load-bearing room, so all the walls are concrete or some other kind of hard, un-thumbtack-able stuff.
There's only one fiber line coming into the building, and that one 100mbps connection is split between the whole building. The only difference between the normal way and my way is that I get the money for splitting it in the building instead of the the ISPs. The network already is largely useless from 7-9PM for anything beyond basic web browsing. They also seem to have a way of killing P2P during that time.
This is an excellent idea for you and other people. I hope it works out for you.
I like the cool blue graphs and things. You illustrate and articulate your points very well. :)
WPA2 is somewhat nigh-uncrackable at the moment.
Heck, calling it 'WPA' is a misnomer, since it actually has its own 802.11 protocol letter.
From what I can tell, WPA is barely more difficult to crack than WPA, which, while much harder to crack than WEP, is still not really secure. I mean, if someone's specifically targeting you, you're still boned. It'll keep random crackers from Kismac/Kismet-ing in so easily, but it just slows someone who knows what they're doing down.
Or that's what it looks like to me.
As far as security goes, I set up WPA2, with MAC filtering, and set static IP's, and set the IP range so that there are no extras. You can also get creative with IP port forwarding to mess with anybody who tries to get on your network. Really though, just a few precautionary measures are all it takes to discourage all but those that just crack systems for fun, because for every person that does secure their wireless, there are two that don't. Free internet is way too easy to come by to dick around with trying to crack shit.
Even with that setup, it seems like you'd have to watch to make sure no one spoofed one of your machines offline. I'm definitely not a security expert, but I'd bet the port forwarding would be the most bitchy thing to try and get past, simply because you'd have to start trying to initialize connections over all 65K ports to try and find the port you wanted, and I'd bet your router would identify that for what it is.
I agree in general that free Internet connections are too easy to come by to bother cracking a protected hotspot, but here in Japan, WPA-protected networks are very rare. Figure less than 1 in 10 of the networks I've seen encrypted were using anything but WEP. Out of 20 networks, you'll have 15 covered with WEP, 1 with WPA, and the remaining four open. This is all well and good, except that my place isn't covered by any open networks, so I have to walk around to get a Wi-Fi connection.
Or I did.
Now I simply have my own 'Net connection and use Wi-Fi to sell the connection to others. Every so often, I check to make sure nobody I haven't authorized has been on the network. I have bucketloads of bandwidth, just like everybody else, so I just don't care that much.
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