Belkin Telephones - Top Accessories

As I sit here awaiting my final exam (and essay) submission for the semester, I have to wonder what is to become of my interest connection once the iiNet case is over.

Here’s the situation. I live near a station, so it’s a relatively high traffic area for people, cars, and the combination of people sitting in cars. At such a stage I might not be worried, but the increase in mobile telephones with WiFi capabilities starts to cause a problem. This network has been hit at least six times in the last year, with obvious brute force attempts resulting in my shutting down the main Access Point. The back-up access point (a WEP ’secured’ device) runs on a network with a limited number of IP addresses, distributed within a random IP range, with just enough room for the devices, which have static ARP tables (written to ‘locked’ flash media in the system administering the limited network connectivity). Naturally, I’m not worried about someone hacking the WEP network, as the only internet connection it has is to my ISP’s (iiNet’s) FTP mirror — if they hack into the network and download Linux that’s fine with me, my ISP, the government, AFACT, and pretty much everyone except Apple and Microsoft who would rather have their business. Jokes aside, I’m still worried.

Our old WiFi system was based off iiNet’s 4 port WiFi Belkin Router. For those in the know, I refer to the dreadfully outdated white hunk of plastic which locked up half the time (until the more recent release which just caused it to live in a state of constant ‘random’ connectivity for WiFi). Now I am faced with a problem of securing my equipment here. The network runs two primary APs (neither are the Belkin all-in-[I]-wonder-[why I bought this]). One is a Netgear WAG102, which is the ‘WEP’ system (put in place for a Phillips Pronto, for those who care), and the other shall remain unnamed (due to the constant threat of firmware bugs — ordinarily I have no fear, but this is serious). As a result of the latter AP (the primary AP), which runs on the main LAN, I must rethink my routing situation.

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In part two of this article I am going to be talking about each piece of networking equipment and how it interacts with the network and its importance.

The basic goal for any network is to create a reliable, fast and easy to maintain infrastructure. Our network had the following criteria:

All Television, Telephone, and Internet is to be powered by Time Warner Cable (TW).

Telephone via TW VOIP, Using the 66 block all house phone jacks work. Television via TW Digital Cable, our house has two High Definition, and two Standard Definition TV’s. Internet via TW High Speed Internet, by setting up a simple network we can share this with our 6 computers and have network enabled backups.

In the last article we talked about our goals for the network and outlined the network map.

Television

The signal coming into the 3 way splitter is low to begin with and is causing some of our HD channels to come in pixelated at times, so the only way to combat that was to install a Multimedia Drop Amplifier that has a +20db output signal. After the amp I have a 8 way splitter with 5 rooms connected, leaving 3 ports free, on those 3 I put terminators on to prevent signal loss and interference. With the new amp and splitter installed, the televisions are all now working much better and very rarely do they go blocky.

Phone (more...)