Two Questions: Securing my wireless network and choosing a mounting location for the WAP

[MrBond]

My parents got me a bunch of wireless gear for christmas this year, and I'm about to move into my house and hook it all up. Just to test things out, I rigged it up to the 56k modem router here and got going with wireless. I've currently set it up as follows:

128bit WEP
Changed SSID
MAC Address access only

Is this sufficent to secure the network? I'm the only one going to be using it. It's possible another laptop user will be, biut I can give her the key if she wants to access it. I don't really expect much in the way of hacking attempts, but I would like to be able to keep the casual snooper from getting on the network and stealing bandwidth.

Also, currently, all of my networking stuff is in the basement of my house. I'll be using the laptop mostly on the first floor of the house, directly above the router. I'm fairly sure I'm going to have range issues, but I plan on mounting the router as close to the ceiling of the basement as possible. Should I think about picking up a high gain antenna?

 

[ericboo]

You should be fine in terms of signal strength directly above your networking equipment, but if you have concrete floors you may have problems. Try it out, but external antennas work great. My brother went from no signal to good signal two floors up with one and I have had similar success.

I am awaiting delivery of Linksys' piggyback signal booster to get stronger signal to another neighbor.

The only other thing you could do, if you wireless router supports it, is to disable broadcasting of your SSID. That's about as far as you can take it.

Myself, I don't use WEP, changed the SSID and keep saying I will implement MAC address filtering, but that has been for over a year now. I watch the DHCP table to see if anyone "new" pops in. No one so far. Thought I had someone until I realized it was the network adapter I just put in my PS2.

There is netstumbler available somewhere, where you can scout for other wireless networks around you.

 

[skyking]

Remember to get the MAC addy of your friend's computer and put it in. I was configuring a router the other day, and forgot to include the MAC addy of the desktop I was using to set it up. I selected "save changes", and bingo! I was locked out, LOL!!
I had to do a hard reset

 

[MrBond]

Yeah, I'm going to try netstumbler some day when I'm bored on campus. I joined the forums over there the other day so I could get some info on wireless in general.

I'm not sure you can disable the SSID broadcast on this router or not (mr318). I've not found a place where I can manually put it into the NIC either, but then again, I haven't opened the manual for it

I worry about snooping just because I live in a college town where I'm sure it goes on. I don't want someone pulling packets out of the air with my CC number in them (although I will do my best to keep sensitive information done on the wired desktop)