Strav's blog

After finding out first hand just how easy it is to hack into wireless networks - yes, even networks with WEP on, I decided to take steps to make it more difficult to connect to my network. The first step was to get a router which would handle the newer WPA/WPA2 encryption types. Some time ago a friend had turned me on to the Linksys WRT54G access point - it runs linux and there are a number of firmware mods that can be applied to enhance the behavior. I bought one of these and proceeded to update the firmware and begin configuration. It was quite simple on my windows installations, however, my Debian installations are another matter. I started out installing wpa-supplicant and struggling with getting it to work with my internal mini-pci (Intel 2200bg) wireless cards. After a few hours of this, I decided that I would come back to that and instead try something a little easier - a cardbus prism based NIC. Along the way, I started to clean up other parts of my system. Since this had originally been set up with a 2.4 kernel, I had been using ifrename to rename the interfaces. Of course, it's running 2.6 with udev now so I set up the udev rules and removed ifrename. For some reason, the udev rules weren't working for the pcmcia card. I updated to the very latest version, and now they aren't working for any interfaces. I've been through the rules forward and backward to no avail. These same rules (well, different mac addresses, but otherwise identical) work perfectly on hal so I know they are good. Apparently I'm not alone in this. Here's a link to someone who is experiencing the exact same issue. Hopefully the issue will be resolved soon so I can get back to setting up a more secure network.