Securing a home network

[johnq86]

I have a netgear wire less router.My main pc is connected to the router directly and i connect my laptop throught wireless lan.How do i make the network a password secured one?

[lynx]

Rather than use a password you should use the highest level authentication and encryption available.

Personally I'd use AES encryption with WPA2-PSK authentication, see if that's available. WPA2-802.1x would be even better, but I doubt whether you have a RADIUS server.

Although there are instances where AES has been cracked, it has only been done in instances where the type of data was known, and even then needed over 200 million pieves of plain text in order to do it. The amount of work involved is way beyond what anyone would want to use just to get access your network.

I'm pretty certain that Netgear servers offer WPA2-PSK authentication, but I can't find any details about the encryption used so it may be plain old WEP. In fact, it looks like they believe WPA2-PSK is an encryption method.

To set it up, go to the wireless setup page on your router and select WPA(2)-PSK, and type in an authentication key. Set the same thing on your laptop's wireless configuration properties.

If that's not clear enough, you will have to say which model you've got.

Oh, and you may have to set up the router via your wired connection, because as soon as you secure the router you won't be able to access it from the wireless laptop until you've changed that too, and if you change the laptop first you can't access the router...

[fstrulz]

What lynx said... and make sure to change its default Administrator Password.

If you don't know how to do it, Netgear's Online Support will be your best reference.

[MaaxHimself]

Oh and by the way...most default router ip addresses are 192.168.1.1,
and the default passwords can be found at http://www.phenoelit-us.org/dpl/dpl.html

[johnq86]

i already secured the newtwork....I have setup a wireless home network.my pc is connected directly to the wireless router with an ethernet wire.I connect to the newtwork through my laptop wirelessly.The problem is that the main pc loses the connection to the internet every 10 minutes or so.the only was i can get the connection agian is to restart the computer.when i click the repair button it says that the ip address could not be renewed.what can i do to fix this?