Why you shouldn’t let builders anywhere near your Wi-Fi

Friday, October 14th, 2011

I’ve just had a proper argument. My circle of friends and even a few colleagues at Dennis will tell you, this isn’t unusual of itself, so I won’t do the down the pub routine that relies heavily on the phrase “So then I said…”. I’ll give you the helicopter view.

It was an argument about Wi-Fi. I went to a meeting to go through re-wiring a retail shop to accommodate a CCTV system, the sales PCs, the PDQ card-payment setup, and the email workstation. There was also a couple of new ventures, in the shape of kiosks for customers to look through the website and ask about styles, sizes and colours not visible in the shop.

At this meeting were the proprietors, me, and a jobbing interior decorator. The list of snags, water leaks and bits of paint and the like was long and diverse: then we came to the wiring. Just a small shop, but very quickly we arrived at a total of 15 locations. It’s also an old building, which means that it won’t be falling down any time soon; but conversely, drilling holes is going to be a proper rufty-tufty builder’s job, one I am very glad I won’t be undertaking. Looking at the job in hand, the jobbing builder decided to propose a different approach: Why not just put in wireless?

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How insecure is IPv6?

Friday, March 25th, 2011

The internet has been running out of space for the best part of ten years now, address space that is. In a nutshell, the 4,294,967,296 addresses provided by IPv4 are pretty much exhausted and so we must start embracing IPv6 which can provide a few more.

How many, exactly?

How does 340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 addresses sound to you?

Now I’m not going to get stuck into the whole ‘how to migrate to IPv6 thing’ here, nor even the debate about how long we really have left to make that migration (although Steve Cassidy will be examining this in issue 200 of PC Pro). Nope, I’m more interested in what the potential impact upon internet security will be when it’s a done deal and everything is connected to the internet.

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HMG, the social contract, and the elephant joke

Sunday, June 7th, 2009

According to the BBC, the man who used to be in charge of listening to you, thinks all of us should be listened to a lot more. Not ‘listening’ in the sense of careful, attentive and responsive duty to serve: rather, listening in the sneaky, all-encompassing, watching out for bad guys style of listening.

I can’t help thinking that this is an echo of a dried-up, bureaucratic and increasingly irrelevant administration: reading the plaintive call of the uber-spook side-by-side with the quiet and simple statements of the man brokering the expenses leaks gives some idea of the error being made by the modern British civil servant.

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Windows 7: networking

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

Networking has been beefed up in a number of subtle ways in Windows 7. The first is a new feature called HomeGroup. This essentially turns all the Windows 7 PCs on the home network into a combined pool of data and files, much like a Windows Home Server or a NAS appliance.

Using a new feature called Libraries in Windows Explorer, you select and open files on the HomeGroup network as if they were stored locally on your PC. It’s also possible to search for files (using tags and filenames, or more advanced searches, such as the month a photo was taken) across the entire HomeGroup.

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Windows Vista in helpful message shocker!

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

I’m not the world’s biggest Vista fan. I don’t have it on my desktop machines, but I do on my laptops since even I’ll admit its suspend & resume is far more reliable than XP’s (or Ubuntu’s, or Fedora’s for that matter). One of the things I truly hate about it though, is the networking configuration interface. It never fails to lead me round in circles no matter how much I use it. It’s like a maze with moving walls and it gives me the willies.

So imagine my surprise today when it actually did something useful. (more…)

Having fun with Windows’ networks-diagnosis tool

Monday, May 19th, 2008

It could be that I’m incredibly unlucky, or it could be that the built-in Windows network repair tool is entirely hopeless. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve used it, but can remember with absolute certainty how many times it’s worked: none.

The most recent time I optimistically pressed the ‘Diagnose and repair’ link was this weekend, when it came up with the entirely unhelpful message that the reason for my faulty wireless network was because a cable wasn’t connected into my Ethernet port. A big thank you to the Microsoft error dialog writers for that one.

In the end, I had no alternative: I had to resort to the time-honoured reboot. Even that didn’t work. Nor did rebooting the router. In fact, it was only when I called my dad and talked the problem through that he pointed out the error must be a software setting somewhere. This, I should shamefacedly admit, was after I’d swapped out the router and all the connecting cables.

It took me a princely 24 hours to solve the problem, and with a better diagnosis tool I reckon that would have been 24 seconds. Surely it’s not beyond the ken of Microsoft to build a tool that works out the two bits of a network that aren’t connecting as they should?

So am I just unlucky? Are other people out there having success with it?