Friday, March 23, 2007

Broadband piggybackers

One other thing that I will be replacing this weekend is my WRT54G wireless router. It seems to be a bit fried, keeps loosing wireless functionality, appears a bit slow. So, they are cheap, I bought a new one.

Anyhow, I was just looking around in the setup of the old router (which I had flashed with DD-WRT actually - undecided whether I will bother again...) to make sure there were not any funky settings that I should note down. What do I see but the list of clients. There are two hosts there that I don't recognise(1). Heh, neighbours piggybacking my broadband... Well, one of them is not connected, and the other has about 11% signal to noise ratio - so they can't be having fun. I was just wondering though... If you were annoyed at your neighbours using your connection(2), maybe you could configure them into the DMZ. The DMZ in case you don't know, is the ‘demilitarised zone’, which means they are totally open on the internet. Normally our machines that are behind the router have only a NAT connection to the internet and thus most incoming requests are blocked by the router. So you accept the consequences if you forward a port from the router to your machine. Putting someone in the DMZ however, forwards all other ports (not forwarded elsewhere) to that machine. I wonder how much that would suck.

(1) Actually it's weird, one has 3 associated MAC addresses and the other has 2.

(2) To tell you the truth, I couldn't care less. I did have it secured before just for the fun of it, but in the end if someone really wants onto your router they can pretty much have it anyways. All the security really does is make it annoying for your friends and flatmates to use the router.

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