Switching from Wired to Wireless - should be easy but completely stumped!

Hi people,

I have been trying to find a straighforward way of turning my wi-fi
signal off when I don't need it.

By way of background my home set up is a reasonably powerful desktop
which I use for most of my home computing requirements and a work laptop
with a wireless network adaptor in it. The desktop is a wired connection
(using the ethernet cable). I only use the laptop to log in to my office
network remotely using a VPN connection.

I'd rather not be broadcasting a wi-fi signal unneccessarily (at
weekends and at night etc) for security reasons etc. It seems sensible
to turn on the wireless signal when I need it rather than have it on all
the time.

I thought this would be straightforward but called sky support just to
check. They confirmed that all I needed to do was to log into the
router, go to wireless settings and disable wireless access point and
broadcast SSID.

I did this and initially it was fine. no wireless signal but desktop
working fine. When I came to use my work laptop, I logged in and
reenabled these boxes. The wifi signal started broadcasting straightaway
(i could tell this because the network was picked up on my PDA.

For some reason however, the work laptop could not recognise the signal
and would not communicate with laptop. I thought problem must be at the
router end because it was the first time I'd turned laptop on since
disabling signal.

I called sky support and went through all the usual stuff (checking
network key, SSID, checking network adaptors were working in device
manager) but got nowhere. The problem was enventually resolved by the IT
guy at work reconfiguring settings on the laptop (I think he simply did
a system restore).

Surely there must be a way of disabling signal without it messing up
laptop settings every time?

Any help would be appreciated.

Regards,

Antony

 

My opinion is that you're worrying unnecessarily. Simply broadcasting a
signal presents very little actual risk. So long as you've configured proper
security on your wireless router, so what if someone sees you? They won't be
able to do anything. So save yourself the hassle.

Now, of course, we need to define "proper security." This does NOT include:
WEP, MAC address filtering, or hiding your SSID. None of these will stop an
attacker, despite the fact that many people still recommend the last two.
WPA and WPA2, either in preshared (authentication) key mode or with a RADIUS
server, are the only real choices that address known wireless attacks. I'm
going to assume that you don't have a RADIUS server at your house, so
WPA-PSA or WPA2-PSK should be what you use.

I've written more about the fallacy of MAC filtering and SSID hiding here:
http://blogs.technet.com/steriley/archive/2007/10/16/myth-vs-reality-wireless-ssids.aspx.
That article also includes links to information on configuring WPA and WPA2
in Windows, which will be helpful for you if that's what you're running.