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Grex > Micros > #255: Mac wireless internet networks. | |
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| Author |
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| 25 new of 86 responses total. |
prp
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response 35 of 86:
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Sep 18 20:16 UTC 2004 |
Back to Comcast Modems, I heard that they they have problems with more than
15 computers on the ethernet network. Motorola says the modem works with
up to 32 computers.
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gull
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response 36 of 86:
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Sep 20 03:09 UTC 2004 |
Re resp:33: I thought we were talking about a wireless network?
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rcurl
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response 37 of 86:
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Sep 20 07:24 UTC 2004 |
Right - my ethernet LAN (2 computers) connects wirelessly to the internet.
Neither computer has an Airport card - the LAN has a wireless adapter, but
its not an Airport card. The router, however, is an Airport base.
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gull
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response 38 of 86:
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Sep 20 15:53 UTC 2004 |
Oh, okay. In that case, you're not going to get signal strength
information from your computer directly. You'll have to get it from the
wireless bridge on the LAN. Maybe it has a built-in webpage you can
look at?
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rcurl
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response 39 of 86:
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Sep 20 18:40 UTC 2004 |
It has a built-in webpage for configuring the SSID and security parameters
but it only shows field strength if one configures the Airport base to
transmit its SSID - which isn't adviseable. But I think you've put your
finger on it - I can't have my pie and eat it too.
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rcurl
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response 40 of 86:
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Jan 11 16:52 UTC 2005 |
(Further to the above stuff....) For security on my wi-fi Internet access
I have made it a Closed Network and implemented 128 bit WEP. I now think I
can also implement Access Control to the Apple Extreme Base Station by
listing there the permitted MAC addresses.
As described previously, I have a wired LAN with a PowerMac G4 and an
iMac, connecting to the Base Station with a wireless ethernet Adapter. I
can find a MAC address on the G4 but not on the iMac (neither has an
Airport card installed), while the Adapter itself has a MAC address. Is
the latter all I need to list on the Base Station to permit access for
both of the computers on the LAN?
I realize that if I have a visitor for whom I would like to permit access
to my Internet connection from their laptop, I would have to enter their
MAC address into the Base Station as well as the security parameters into
their computer. This doesn't happen often, however.
(The reason I don't just try it is that if I lock myself out of the Base
Station by something I do - which I did several times in setting up the
system - , it takes a while to reset the Base Station to its default
settings and the Adapter for that, so I can access it to reset the
security options.)
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blaise
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response 41 of 86:
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Jan 12 18:49 UTC 2005 |
That's why I like having a wireless router that has an ethernet switch
built in -- if I lock the wireless portion, I can adjust the
configuration with a wired system. (Right now I'm using a Netgear
802.11b router; I hope to upgrade to a Linksys 802.11g router soon. The
reason I want to switch to Linksys is that their firmware is open
source, so I can add things like IPv6 support.)
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rcurl
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response 42 of 86:
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Jan 12 18:55 UTC 2005 |
The reason I have my wireless setup is so I would not have to run an
ethernet cable from the LAN, which is in a different part of the house
from the cable termination point.
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rcurl
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response 43 of 86:
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Jan 23 07:29 UTC 2005 |
Further to my #40 (and, more specifically):
Question was: do I have to enter both the computer MAC address and the
Adapter MAC address into the Apple Extreme Base Station Access Control
list?
New Question: what formats of the MAC (hardware) address are allowable.
I've seen them written as 04:05:a6:..., as 04.05.a6...., and as 04 05
a6.... Does it, then, not matter what the delimiter is, even just a space?
(I gather that case is not important - correct?)
(I found the iMac MAC (hardware) address.)
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gull
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response 44 of 86:
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Jan 23 22:59 UTC 2005 |
I'd guess just the MAC address of your wireless adapter. I'm assuming
the "computer MAC address" is the MAC address of its ethernet adapter.
I'm not absolutely sure, though; if you're doing some kind of bridging,
you may need to enter both.
MAC addresses are written out with various delimiters, but the wireless
access points I've used seem to want them entered with the delimiters
left out, as a single string of hexadecimal digits.
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twenex
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response 45 of 86:
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Jan 24 01:07 UTC 2005 |
Sorry to muddy the waters, but mine wants hex digits separated into pairs by
colons.
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rcurl
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response 46 of 86:
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Jan 24 07:43 UTC 2005 |
Are they case sensitive, too?
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gull
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response 47 of 86:
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Jan 24 14:29 UTC 2005 |
I doubt it, but God only knows what someone out there is programmed.
All of my wireless access points have had odd, sometimes amusing
firmware bugs. (But then, I buy cheap crap.)
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gull
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response 48 of 86:
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Jan 24 14:29 UTC 2005 |
What someone out there *has* programmed, rather.
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rcurl
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response 49 of 86:
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Jan 24 19:36 UTC 2005 |
http://www.erg.abdn.ac.uk/users/gorry/course/lan-pages/mac-vendor-codes.htm
l
has some info about the MAC address, viz:
"Ethernet MAC
"Ethernet hardware addresses are 48 bits, expressed as 12 hexadecimal
digits (0-9, plus A-F, capitalized). They might be written unhyphenated
(e.g., 123456789ABC), or with one hyphen (e.g., 123456-789ABC), but should
be written hyphenated by octets (e.g., 12:34:56:78:9A:BC). This gives a
theoretical 281,474,976,710,656 addresses. This is more than 56,000 MAC
addresses for each person on the planet!"
Note that it says "A-F, capitalized". Yet in both my iMac and G4 their MAC
addresses are shown with the letters in lower case, while the iMac has
the address hyphenated with dots and the G4 with colons (and the Adapter
uses the format stated in the quote above).
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gull
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response 50 of 86:
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Jan 24 19:39 UTC 2005 |
As far as I know, capitalizing hex digits is just a convention. I've
seen them both ways, and of course from a mathmatical point of view it
doesn't matter at all.
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rcurl
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response 51 of 86:
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Jan 24 19:56 UTC 2005 |
Of course, the software has to recognize an "e" as an "E", which have
different hex representations when considered as ASCII characters. But I
understand what you (and the cited URL) are saying: the representation is just
straight hex. I think I got myself confused on this point, in part because
the 128 bit WEP password is the hex equivalent of an ASCII password. So,
what about whether the "hyphenation" must be by colons, or that hyphenation
is acutally ignored when the string is read?
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gull
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response 52 of 86:
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Jan 24 21:18 UTC 2005 |
On some access points, the 128 bit WEP password is just the hex
equivalent of the ASCII password. On *most* access points, though, it's
actually an MD5 hash of the ASCII password. There's not much
standardization on this point, though, which means if you use wireless
hardware from different manufacturers, you may have to enter the keys in
hex.
The reason for not just using a straight ASCII -> hex conversion is it
would artificially limit the keyspace.
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rcurl
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response 53 of 86:
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Apr 15 17:46 UTC 2005 |
I have enabled Base Station Logging on my Wi-Fi network, but have
some questions:
1. What does the "Logging Level" mean"? It goes from 0 = emergency to 7 =
debug. Airport Help is no help at all - nothing about the Logging Level.
2. Where do I read the logging, and what should I be looking for? It
is apparently sent to the IP address of this computer, and I can find
a mare's-nest of logs in Console, but nothing that looks like logging
of Base Station activity. Will it log logins to the Base Station (I'm
looking, in particular, to find if anyone else is accessing it)?
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gull
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response 54 of 86:
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Apr 16 21:28 UTC 2005 |
The logging level probably sets how verbose the log is. Usually with these
sorts of things a setting of 0 will log only critical errors, and a log
level of 7 logs a huge quantity of debugging information. Often the most
useful setting is somewhere in the lower half of the range, but you'll have
to experiment.
I'm not familiar with OS X's logging, so I can't tell you what file to look
in. You could temporarily turn up the logging level to something fairly
high, then search the log files for the base station's IP address.
I also don't know if OS X is set, by default, to accept log messages from
remote devices. That feature is often turned off on other OS's, because it
can easily be used as an unauthenticated, remotely-accessable disk filling
service. ;)
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scott
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response 55 of 86:
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Apr 17 00:15 UTC 2005 |
OS X does text-based logging in (I think) /var/logs. Basically the Unix
approach, and when I was first trying to figure out a modem problem on my
iBook it was easy to open a terminal window and find the logs.
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rcurl
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response 56 of 86:
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Apr 17 02:23 UTC 2005 |
I upped the Logging Level to "Informational" (6). In /var/log are many
files (and 6 directories). Those that are not empty are: CDIS.custom,
cups(dir), daily.out, system.log, windowserver.log, and
windowserver_last.log. I can't find an IP address (10.0.1.1 for the Base
Station) in any of them.
I directed the Base Station to log to this computer, which has IP
10.0.1.2.
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arthurp
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response 57 of 86:
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Apr 18 06:17 UTC 2005 |
You'll probably need to activate a feature on 10.0.1.2 to allow other
machines to write to it's logs. 'man syslogd' might have the info you
need. 'apropos syslog' may be a longer route to the info. Once it is
ready to receive log messages it will be listening on port 514 udp.
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rcurl
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response 58 of 86:
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Apr 18 17:21 UTC 2005 |
Do you know that to be a feature of OS X? There is a syslogd command, but
I don't know enough to set it up to log from the Base Station (if that can
even be done).
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arthurp
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response 59 of 86:
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Apr 21 01:10 UTC 2005 |
Your syslogd should have inherited the feature from its UNIX roots.
Refer to the included manual page for syslogd from a Linux system.
-r This option will enable the facility to receive message from the
network using an internet domain socket with the syslog service
(see services(5)). The default is to not receive any messages
from the network.
This option is introduced in version 1.3 of the sysklogd pack-
age. Please note that the default behavior is the opposite of
how older versions behave, so you might have to turn this on.
I don't know for sure how OS X sets options for services. Linux would
use /etc/sysconfig/syslogd as a text file containing startup options for
syslogd. It may be the same in OS X. I think they use similar rc scripts.
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