Wifi not seeing hideen SSID

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ron O'Brien
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R

Ron O'Brien

One of the best bits of advice you can be given when setting up a wireless
router is to hide the SSID (Netgear recommends this) and for quite some time
now, that is exactly what I've done, in addition to MAC address enabling and
WPK WEP security...but on my wifes Sony Vaio laptop running Vista premium,
it will not connect to the Netgear wifi router unless the SSID is visable

Ron
 
Ron said:
One of the best bits of advice you can be given when setting up a wireless
router is to hide the SSID (Netgear recommends this) and for quite some time
now, that is exactly what I've done, in addition to MAC address enabling and
WPK WEP security...but on my wifes Sony Vaio laptop running Vista premium,
it will not connect to the Netgear wifi router unless the SSID is visable
Click to expand...

Actually whoever gave you that advice did not give you the "best bits"
because it is wrong. I don't care if Netgear recommends this. It's wrong.

Hiding your SSID does not deter network scanners at all. It merely makes
your computer constantly shout out "is there a Linksys around?"
publicly. That makes it even easier for a Bad Person to find your
wireless network.

There was an excellent thread about this with a very clear explanation
of why not broadcasting the SSID is foolish in one of the MS Vista
newsgroups this morning. You can do a Google Groups Advanced Search for
something like "hide SSID" and constrain the search to
microsoft.public.windows.vista.* and recent time.


Malke
 
Ron O'Brien said:
One of the best bits of advice you can be given when setting up a wireless
router is to hide the SSID (Netgear recommends this) and for quite some
time now, that is exactly what I've done, in addition to MAC address
enabling and WPK WEP security...but on my wifes Sony Vaio laptop running
Vista premium, it will not connect to the Netgear wifi router unless the
SSID is visable
Click to expand...


In addition to Malke's excellent advice (to go and read my other posting on
this topic in this newsgroup), I would recommend that you read the whole of
this article:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/network/evaluate/hiddennet.mspx

Read the whole article (it's a very easy read), don't skip down to the piece
that tells you how to unscrew the nuts on your front fork of your bike
without first reading why it's dangerous to ride it that way.

Alun.
~~~~
 
In addition to Malke's excellent advice (to go and read my other posting on
this topic in this newsgroup), I would recommend that you read the whole of
this article:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/network/evaluate/hiddennet.mspx
Click to expand...

May want to throw in reading the 802.11 standards too. That way you'd find
out that hiding the SSID violates the standard, and should, and will, cause
undefined behavior, such as forcibly connecting to rogue APs and not the
legitimate ones.
 
Thanks all.

Isn't it strange how this industry just can't get it's advice to match. A
part from Netgear suggesting hiding you SSID, I've read three 'security'
articles from well known and qualified technical writers in Computer
Magazines, who have also made this suggestion - although one does say it has
little effect on a determined hacker

Ron
 
Cast-it Admin said:
Isn't it strange how this industry just can't get it's advice to match. A
part from Netgear suggesting hiding you SSID, I've read three 'security'
articles from well known and qualified technical writers in Computer
Magazines, who have also made this suggestion - although one does say it
has little effect on a determined hacker
Click to expand...

There's security experts, and there's "security experts".

You'll soon learn to tell the difference.

Alun.
~~~~
 
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