How do I protect my wireless internet access?  I have a wireless
linksys router that I connected to a computer.  When I bring any
laptop or second computer with wireless access, it always can detect
the LAN and get on the internet through my cable modem.  I wnat to
prevent my neighbors, etc from leeching off of my internet.

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Request for Question Clarification by supermacman-ga on 03 Aug 2003 16:53 PDT

Actually, I am reasonably certain that you can enable MAC address
filtering on your Linksys router. Can you give me the model of your
LinkSys router, so that I can give you specific instructions as to
enabling this security feature?

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Clarification of Question by sammyb-ga on 03 Aug 2003 17:14 PDT

Model befw11s4v2

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Request for Question Clarification by supermacman-ga on 04 Aug 2003 09:02 PDT

If you login to your router (http://192.168.1.1), enter your network
password (default: admin) and click on the "Setup" tab, you can enter
a unique SSID and disable SSID Broadcast. This should help prevent
unauthorized users from discovering your wireless network.

Similar to monobovo's suggestion, you can limit the number of DHCP
clients you serve. If you have twenty machines that need to access the
router, you can specify the router to assign IP addresses to only
twenty clients. Configure this under the DHCP tab, with the field
"Number of DHCP users". This solution is fully secure if all your DHCP
clients are turned on, all the time.

If some clients are turned off (thus freeing up some IP addresses),
you may want to resort to the static IP/DHCP off solution. This
involves:
1) assigning each of your computers an IP address, preferably one that
begins in 192.168.1.x, starting at 192.168.1.2.
2) turning off the DHCP server in the router
3) fitering all IP addresses outside the range of your own machines
(i.e. 0.0.0.0 to 192.168.1.0, and 192.168.1.20 to 255.255.255.255 if
you have 19 machines)

With regards to my earlier question clarification - Unfortunately, MAC
filtering is exclusive, not inclusive. In other words, you specify MAC
addresses to filter, rather than specifying MAC addresses to allow.
Therefore, this feature does not prevent unauthorized users from
accessing your network.

Let me know if this is a satisfactory answer.

- supermacman

I know you don't have Apple's AirPort 802.11 wireless router, but your
LinkSys product may provide a similar feature.

AirPort provides the ability to reduce transmitter power, so that
clients outside the radio range will be unable to access your network.
AirPort also allows you to limit access by MAC address - each Ethernet
client has a built-in, unmodifiable, permanent identifier known as a
MAC address. You can specify which MAC addresses may access your
network.
AirPort also supports share-level access via a user ID and password (I
believe).

http://www.apple.com/airport/
http://www.apple.com/airport/specs.html

Disable DHCP and create a static IP address range limited to the
number of resources you have on your network.

The outside computers are probably connecting throught her DHCP. If
you don't know how to do this, let me know.

Good luck