Please don’t feed the “Free Public WiFi” troll!

 29 Nov 2006 09:54:05 pm

A couple of weeks ago I was at a training up in Seattle and saw the open wireless SSID “Free Public WiFi”; I tried to connect but didn’t get an IP and disconnected. Than last week I was in LAX and saw the same SSID, after trying to connect and failing to get yet another DHCP address. I checked and noticed that this was an ad-hoc network (computer to computer).

At first I just thought it was a strange coincidence but then today I was on the phone with one of our sales guys who was in Eugene (Oregon) and he mentioned that he was trying to get on a wireless network with the same name.

A quick Google search shows that I’m not the only one noticing these networks popping up all over the place. Apparently if you configure Windows XP to connect to an ad-hoc network (as everyone who tries to connect to one of these networks is doing) than it adds them to the list of preferred networks and tries to connect to them in the future (broadcasting out the SSID for everyone else to see).

For those of you running Vista whenever you connect to a new network you are given the option of whether to save the connection (the default is not to). So long as you tell it to not save the connection your computer shouldn’t broadcast this network in the future.

Aside from just being obnoxious this could have some security implications for you. For example if you aren’t running a software firewall (or if you are but have made exceptions) anyone could connect to an ad-hoc network you are broadcasting and attempt to access your computer.

The solution appears to be simple. Configure your client to connect to only infrastructure networks. I think this should be the default anyways considering the infrequency that users connect to ad-hoc networks.

Cheers,

Erik

Posted By : Erik | Category: Networking | Comments [[140]] | Trackbacks [0]

  One Media, Multiple Vistas

 18 Nov 2006 02:44:35 pm

Okay actually 2 medias, x86 and x64…

Under Windows XP you had different media for each version of XP and each licencing (i.e. Retail vs. MSDN vs . VLA vs. OEM). Multiply that out times the various availabilities and there were something like 12 different pieces of media a support team may need to do XP installs.

Fast forward to Vista. We’ve known for some time that they rolled the various versions into a single piece of media but the answer that I couldn’t get was whether there would be different media for Volume Licenses, MSDN & Retail.

The good news is that with RTM being available this week I can test and confirm for sure. So I downloaded the retail ISO from the connect site as well as the MSDN site and hashed both of them. I’m happy to report that the hashes are the same! I’ve been able to install on my work laptop using my VLA key, in the lab using my MSDN key and on my computer at home using my retail key!

I’m guessing that with OEM licenses it’s not going to be as straight forward, but hopefully they’ll follow the same builds internally (so at least you’d only need one piece of media per manufacturer).

Cheers,
Erik

Posted By : Erik | Category: General | Comments [[149]] | Trackbacks [0]