McCarran Wireless

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McCarran Airport in Las Vegas recently started offering free wi-fi. That's great and all, but they've got it so locked down you can't do much with it. I can't connect to any instant messaging servers and I can't get my e-mail via secure IMAP from work. I was eventually able to get the e-mail by tunneling through our VPN, but still no solution for the instant messaging. I've still got an hour until my flight leaves, and while web access is better than nothing, denying e-mail and IM traffic is absurd. Update: It's also slooow as molasses. I've got pretty good signal strength, but am getting completely erratic connections. They put this in for the CES show that started today, and as far as I'm concerned, it's a failure.

802.1x no longer good enough

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This article from George Ou is an alarming way to start the morning.  It details the new attacks on the WEP protocol, which is known to be broken, but was generally assumed to be “good enough” when rotated often.  Unfortunately, that is no longer the case, so we need to look at moving to the next generation of encryption on our Wireless LAN ASAP.  In an educational setting such as ours, however, this is a little trickier, I’ve got about 750 clients spread around campus, and I can’t get that many users to turn on a dime.  To make them even grumpier, this is going to “break” a lot of older wireless hardware which is sure to bring the college students out with their pitchforks and torches.  In other words, I’m already having a bad day…

Homeward Bound

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I've had enough fun with wireless for one day.  I compounded the problem by missing a setting in the access point for my cube on Friday.  I've been testing the use of VLANs and multiple SSIDs, and had set the APs in my area to work that way.  Unfortunately, I forgot to adapt the 802.11a radio to use the right VLAN tags when I did the 802.11b/g networks, so I sat here pulling my hair out trying to get a faculty member's laptop to get an IP address, after I fixed the authentication SNAFU that had brought her to me in the first place.  I could see the access point authenticate the machine against the RADIUS server, then the client would just sit there, forever searching for a DHCP server to talk to.

I manually configured the IP address for that machine, just in case there was some momentary DHCP glitch I wasn't aware of, and I still couldn't get a route out.  I mentally stepped through what made this laptop different from any of the others around me, and realized that it had a tri mode 802.1a/b/g card, rather than the vanilla 802.11b/g cards most consumer laptops have.  Sure enough, the 802.11a network wasn't having the right tags put on its packets.  One quick configuration change, a reboot, and we're in business.

That wouldn't have been bad, in and of itself, but this was the 6th or 7th problem laptop of the day that got escalated to me from the help desk, and I didn't get anything else done.  Maybe tomorrow I can try to get caught up on my e-mail...

Oh, and the Macs just work, it's pretty sad that we're authenticating against Microsoft's Active Directory, using Microsoft's RADIUS server, and the Apple 802.1X client works better than the Microsoft one.

But enough wireless for today, I'm going home.

Bad wireless journalism

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This article from the Arizona Republic (as seen on Slashdot) talks about war drivers out to steal your bandwidth and maybe even your credit card number. What the article fails to mention is that every site that deals in credit cards uses SSL encryption, which can't be hacked via wireless, and that if these people had bothered to secure and encrypt their home networks, their packets couldn't be captured. If they don't want their information to be received, they should stop broadcasting it as if they do.

New Proxim AP

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Proxim, our wireless vendor of choice, has released a new access point model today, the AP-700. I haven't nailed down what's new and different about this unit yet, but to me, it looks like an AP-4000, only with either 802.11b/g or 802.11a, but not both. Why I'd choose this, rather than the AP-600, is unclear right now, but hopefully I can get one to play with after my return from Russia.