I got a new wireless router/firewall thingy this morning. Various reasons. Long story.
Anyways, got it home, plugged it in. Restarted wireless networking on my laptop, and got onto the admin pages. Logged in, and started changing all the configuration options to what I wanted. Once I had it all configured, I started testing the port forwarding settings, and realized that nothing was working the way that I thought it was.
After trying various things, I decided to do a factory reset, and start again. I unplugged it, and noticed that my wireless signal strength didn't drop at all. Turns out I had been configuring some neighbor's gateway.
So, the moral of this story, folks, is that you need to change your SSID and your password when you get a wireless gateway. Yeah, I know, they are supposed to just plug in, turn on, and Just Work, but, come on.
Well bad things happens, but in the first place i guess, most people would have seen 2 APs when finding the wireless networks.
But there is no excusre for not changing the default password, NEVER!
That's hilarious if not a little disheartening. I did some testing for wireless devices for a review in a print mag and I caught myself being lazy and using my neighbor's wireless port because it wasn't protected. That is, my own protected wireless router's keys are just too long an cumbersome to look up and key at the time.
I'm good friends with my neighbor's, we party of them all the time, so it's all good. They know, I do when I fix their computers. I keep telling them about it, but they don't want to be "bothered" with shoring it up. I think I might have to insist soon.
Goes to show how easy it is to "default" to another's bandwidth.
Regards,
B.A.R. Editor