Tip #3: Securing Your Wireless Network - Part One

A home wireless network is an easy and convenient way to share an Internet connection and other resources among the computers in your home. While a few people leave their wireless networks available to anyone, most of us want to keep our home wireless networks private. If you’re looking at wireless home networking for the first time and want to keep others from pilfering your wireless connection there are a few options you can use.

The core of your wireless network is the router. By carrying out some easy-to-do configuration on your router, you can ensure that only the people who you want to have access to your network will be able to.

Option 1: Locking Down MAC Addresses

All network adapters have a unique 12-digit identifier called a MAC address. MAC is short for Media Access Control, and it’s a way for the network to ensure that a computer is allowed to access a network. Most routers allow you to specify which MAC addresses are allowed to connect to your network.

How do you find a MAC address? If you’re using a computer with a wireless card, you can find the MAC address by flipping the card over and looking for a block of characters like this: 00:A0:A5:B3:C8:B7. If, on the other hand, your computer has a built-in wireless card, and the MAC address isn’t on the sticker on the bottom, you can use the tools on the system to find the MAC address.

In Windows, click Start > Run. In the Run dialog box, type cmd and then click OK. This opens a command prompt. At the command prompt, type ipconfig /all. Look for the section Ethernet Adapter Wireless Network Connection. Your MAC address is the third entry, beside the heading Physical Address.

Now that you have the MAC address, you can enter it into your router. Different Routers have different Menu systems so look out for something like the following:

• Select Wireless > MAC Address > Wireless Mac Filter.
• Then, click Enable.
• Click the Permit only PCs listed to access the wireless network option.
• Click the Edit MAC Filter List button.
• Type the MAC addresses, one to a field, in this dialog box.
• Then, click Save Settings.

The beauty of using this method is that you can give friends or guests access to your network and then easily remove their access privileges later on.

Related Posts:
• Tip #4: Securing Your Wireless Network - Part Two
• Freecom’s Wireless Network MediaPlayer with 500GB of storage - Brilliant!
• Bountiful WiFi’s Extreme Range WiFi Router

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