After complaining so much about my WiFi problems, I decided to do something about it. I read about it.

The channel on my router was set to automatic and it chose channel 1. But I noticed all the routers in my neighborhood were setting themselves to channels 6 and 11. Maybe my Airport Express was smarter than all the rest, I thought. Maybe I was wrong. Can Apple be wrong?

After nearly a week of bad performance and periodic total disruptions, I learned on Wikipedia (is there another word for learned? Like implied but a little more factual?) …

… I gleaned that FCC regulations allow for high power output on channels 1-6 that are normally reserved for individual use in the US and Canada. I might need to borrow some HAM radio equipment to figure out what’s going on, but this could be why I’ve been having a lousy network for a week. It’s a shame the Airport didn’t figure out what was going on and migrate to the other end of the spectrum along with its Linksys and Netgear brothers.

I manually changed the channel to 8 — a little between 6 and 11 — which apparently no one else had thought to do or been able to. The network meter has consistently been at the top and performance is better. I bragged in a screenshot a few posts ago about downloading at 320kbps but now stuff is coming in at 600kbps. Shows what I know about even what level of service I’m paying for. I still won’t mind having a more powerful base station that can share hard drives on its network once it arrives, but perhaps I have found the issue.

This is such a confounding science.

Sure, I knew that WEP was worthless for encryption. And I feel bad that my parents are using it since the only USB-wifi dongle I could find — two years ago for the TiVo I bought them — only supports WEP encryption. But once that all dies I’m sure we can improve.

(Frankly I’m astonished how long the unattended Mac installations I’ve set up can prosper. My parents have no idea how their [a little bit] complicated network is configured and I haven’t even been there in a while. Meanwhile my Mom’s underfunded High School is still letting her Journalism, English, and Debate students use the lab of cast-off first gen Power Mac G4’s that I set up two years ago with the (even then outdated) Mac OS X 10.3.9. With no maintenance at all, and slightly limited user accounts, they were all still going strong when I had my brother check-up last week. Heck, they’ve been saving the day for kids who don’t even have home computers or what they do have don’t work. Just don’t tell the High School Seniors that the groovy Macs at school were manufactured when they were in elementary school. Much of the maintenance I had planned for my brother’s visit was pointless. Yikes for any IT budget that is more than $0.)

But in my own home I have been using MAC Access Control. I thought that telling a router to only trust a client with a specific address programmed into its hardware was a great way to go. No passwords, no live encrypting and decrypting! Just allowed machines and the rest.

Well this has proven tiresome as three allowed Macs turned into that plus two iPhones and a cat sitter’s Mac and maybe his iPhone too and whatever. Plus the generally knowledgeable folks at the Ars Technica Mac Achaia tell me that MAC address spoofing and sniffing is nearly as easy as cracking a WEP network. Meanwhile WPA2 is hard.

So the Mac Know-It-All accedes to the unpaid real Mac Geniuses.

I will use WPA2. My password is my dog’s name plus a description of some activities he enjoys.

But whatever happened to the days when we could connect to “Linksys” without question? When did “Belkin54g” become a bad word? Is “Netgear” something to shy from? If I live near you, will you connect to “Free Porno 4 U”?

The images in this article were blatantly stolen from the contents of the current Airport Admin Utility made by Apple. Alpha transparency in PNGs embedded in a network router admin app. What a goddamn company.

This is regarding A Series of Tubes, Apple Computers.
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