Apple's New, Improved Airport

timbck2 writes: "Apple has just released a new and greatly improved version of their Airport 802.11b wireless network access point, with better WEP encryption (128-bit now instead of 40-bit), better non-Mac PC integration, and a new LAN connection port. Here are the tech specs." An anonymous reader pointed to Apple's rather bland press release as well. This is a good upgrade to the Airport, with thanks probably due in part to companies like Linksys who are making much less expensive 802.11 base stations (which work great with Airport cards, too), though lacking a modem.

Comments

Re:Runway Length?

[spongman]

I imagine he has interference in the form of walls. it depends what your house is made of, of course, but walls and floors can seriously diminish the range of the signal.

Re:WEP Security

[jandrese]

Thats what we do. Use 128 bit passwords, but then treat the link as insecure. Remember that good security comes in layers. The 128 bit WEP may not provide foolproof security, but it is certainly a deterrent to attack, and if you only run VPN traffic over the network you add yet another layer the cracker must compromise, and if you require that everything connected to the network have a good firewall (with a specified standard ruleset that allows only VPN traffic, and only to the IPs and MACs that we're expecting) then you add yet another layer of security.

What I really want is for the cards to rotate the WEP codes on a regular basis (once ever second for instance) automatically. I actually implemented this on our WaveLans with FreeBSD, but unfortunatly it prevented Windows users from connecting because the Windows drivers weren't nearly as automatable. It also opens a big can of worms with keeping the machines synchronized (ntp helps, but what happens when someone goes away for awhile and their clock drifts?) and coming up with a way of producing the same pseudo-random number on all machines without it being predictable since you obviously can't send the encryption key over the air. This would obviously work a lot better if the cards themselves implemented it and just ran it transparently with only a little bit of extra configuration data (a 128 bit or bigger seed).

Re:almost there.. but not quite

[TheInternet]

I would say the #1 blunder in Apple's release of this product is lack of support for configuring it from an x86 PC (running Windows or Linux or your BSD of choice).

Apple's goal with devices like this and the iPod is not to have everyone (including wintel users) buy them, but to provide more value and a better experience to the Mac platform. From what I can tell, Apple doesn't make much money on the base stations themselves. But as part of the total Mac equation, it makes a lot of sense, espeically in the long term.

They may not explicitly prevent wintel machines from using these devices, but there's no point in making it easy seeing as their main goal is to sell computers.

- Scott