wireless access

[dupas]

I work in an environement of about 120 employees...
I want to have the capabilities of bringing a laptop into a conference room and having access to our network/internet during a meeting. I also want clients to be able to have access only to the internet on their laptops too.

For the amount of people I would have to say maybe 5-8 at one time, no more than 20 ever.

I would like to secure it so no outsider can hit the network.

How can I go about doing this? What piece of equipment do I need to purchase for a medium size company?

 

[Spirit]

Depends on the geographical size of your network and what you want to do in terms of reports, blocking, security etc.

I have one wee 3Com office connect that serves me for 33,000 sqr feet with excellent signal and diminishes after that.

If you block outsiders using it then you need to encrypt it but if you want visitors to be able to connect to it without issue then you need to leave it open. Or come up with a way of publicising the encryption key.

I would recomend 2:
1 for internal users
1 for visitors

Use non-broadcasting SSID for internal users with as much security that your Wireless adapters can handle and make this networked. (Even if this is hacked the person hacking still needs to get past your windows security to access anything).

Stick the second one out in your DMZ or striaght on the internet and either leave this open - means ANYONE can access it - or leaving it broadcasting the Sid and distribute the encryption key to certain people who will have visitors needing access or insist visitors contact you to come and install the key.

Iain

 

[dput]

You really want your internal (private) wireless network to use WPA2, don't broadcast the ssid and 802.1x authentication. This should provide you with strong protection. Some Wireless Access Points allow you to do both the private and the public wireless on the same access point and split the traffic using VLAN's.

Dan

 

[Auger282]

at a min.. use WPA with a preshared key..

dont use the default ssid.. turn broadcasting off (even though this does not disable beaconing)..

We use a reservation DHCP server with Fluke monitoring software to make sure that no one sneaks on with a static configured node. But I would imagine this depends on how you currently have your node addressing setup.

I would go with a subnet or a vlan where the AP is internet only if you want to go that route...