Supercharging Your Linksys Wireless Access Point

kwishot writes "Xam over at www.wi2600.org has documented a relatively simple way to 'turn up the juice' on your Linksys WAP11 Wireless Access Point." Caveats: the outlined method requires a Windows box, recent firmware, and (some) bravery, but no going inside the box or special hardware.

Comments

SNMP?

[omega9]

From what i can tell, this doesn't have to be a Windows only hack. The piece of software that Xam states is only built for Win32 seems to be nothing more then an SNMP manager. Now, the Win32 tool might make it a bit easier, but you can hardly call it "requires a Windows box".

Wireless Phone interference

[joel8x]

Here's my question - I own a 2.4Ghz Seimens wireless phone and whenever I use that it cancels out my computer's wireless access! Does anyone know if this hack will affect this behavior (worse or better)? I would try it myself, but I use my iBook's Airport card for wireless access and can't run the program they use from my Mac, which would mean getting a PC wireless card to perform the hack.

Re:Wireless Phone interference

[jandrese]

Well, since your phone is probably some analog deal that just blasts out your voice, I'd say upping the power on the access point will just add a bit more noise to your conversation (and probably not help too much in keeping the signal strong when you pick up the phone, although it should help a little).

A better hack might be to change the channel on your access point to something on the other end of the spectrum since you phone may not be taking up the entire band (unless it's a DSS phone). Or you might try moving your phone's base station and access point to opposite ends of the house.

PS: Whoever modded this as a troll: what were you thinking?

Other 802.11b improvements

[Arkham]

There are two worthwhile articles over at Macintouch about 802.11b (AirPort in the mac world). I thought they might be interesting to people looking to improve their wireless LAN performance or range.

Adding WaveLAN Extender - This article discusses adding various antennae to base stations to improve their range.

Extending TheAirPort's Range - This article discusses some more radical procedures, including some neat stuff with Directional Antennae which allow 802.11b to work as far away as a 57 Kilometers. They also discuss various antennae to add to laptops in order to improve their range.

Fun with Wap11

[bwags]

Funny, I just worked on boosting my power this weekend before this post. It works like a champ! This info came out earlier this fall but it is nice to see it all written up in such a nice manner. I have a whole bunch of printouts describing all this stuff and I somehow pieced it all togethter. I have a couple of notes of interest pertaining to this stuff:

First, I never did upgrade the firmware to 1.4g5 or 1.4g7, I am running 1.4H3. I guess I should upgrade, but that would require me to actually get the AP next to my PC for the USB connection. The upgrade seems to work OK without the latest rev as long as you can connect via snmp. I think I must have the 1.0 hardware since I got this thing Jan 2001.

Second, I think you can also turn off the SSID on your WAP using these utilities. I have not tried this but perhaps it could help if you are paranoid...

Finally, The main reason I worked on trying to fugure this out is because my wireless network was running very slow. I finally figured out the reason was the wpc11 linksys pcmcia card that I have. If you have one of these cards make sure to DISABLE the PowerSaveMode in your network configuration (in Windows). Your network will now run significantly faster (500K/sec instead of 50K/Sec in my case). Also when exploring in windows use mapped drives instead of unc names. This seems to also help.

Hope that helps, BRian

Re:This is an elementary SNMP set

[Anonymous Coward]

The OID is enterprises.410.1.1.8.8.0 - but I can't quite figure out what the 14 char octet string should be.
suggestion?

if you want to set this via the CLI from a unix just run

snmpset 192.168.1.250 private enterprises.410.1.1.8.8.0 s "some14charstring"

the "some14charstring" is the important part
-sv

Re:bad engineering practice

[synchrostart]

There are certainly risks associated with doing this hack. First thing is that the human body is most sensative to RF resonating between 30 and 3100 Mhz. Since this falls in that range, sitting next to that access point is probably not a good idea. And since sufficient studies have not been done to test the long term effects of RF on the human body, I wouldn't do it. Heck I keep my access point no less that 4 feet from me and I have the USB tranciever to keep it minimum 4 feet from me as well. And though 1 watt of power isn't a whole lot, when it is sitting next to you and is on all the time is probably not a good idea.

MIB hackery

[danish]

After installing the snmp utils (apt-get install snmp) and doing some minor surgery to the MIB so it would parse correctly, I think I've found the element to modify:

enterprises.atmel.atmelmib.atmelSys.TestModeSettin gsGRP.TestModeRadioConfiguration.0 = Hex: CA CA CA CA CA CA C9 C9 C9 C9 C9 C9 C9 C9

Although not in the same configuration as the article describes, this may be due to the fact that I've never upgraded the firmware on the access point I snmpwalk'd this from. Perhaps I should get busy on that....

Any of you people out there with an upgraded firmware, you should try snmpset under Linux or your UNIX of choice and see what kind of results you get... extra points for verifying the change with the Windows stuff in the article.

Numerically, snmptranslate says that the correct field is .1.3.6.1.4.1.410.1.1.8.8.0, assuming I'm using it right (I called it with the commandline snmptranslate -m +ATMEL-MIB -IR enterprises.atmel.atmelmib.atmelSys.TestModeSettin gsGRP.TestModeRadioConfiguration.0.)

Re:Cable is out.

[Lumpy]

the problem is that your roof will look like a dish farm. 802.11 links require high gain antennas. the pringles can works but a primestar dish works 100times better. the best time to set up your links is mid summer. because 802.11 links will not shoot through trees with leaves. (nice how those water filled leaves absorb 90% of that RF energy you're beaming) getting to non-line of sight requires doubling the links to get around things... (A to B to C with B being a 486 with 2 wifi cards acting as a bridge) your house, if you are the hub will need a dish for every link.. (I gotta take pictures of my 60foot tower.. 3 primestar dishes on it, and 2 more going up this summer) now you can hub off of the other ends of the links, but only if you have control of the equipment at the other end and they dont care about 2-3 more dishes on their roof/tower (and I reccomend you demand towers at the other ends, makes it easier) get ready to have a new full time job if you do this. it will take most of your apare time, it will drain your pocket, and it will make you stop answering your phone. (calls from people when you have an outage, or it rains hard, or other problems... you just became an ISP and you'd be supries how people can bitch at you when their free internet goes down.

Re:This is an elementary SNMP set

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the text page in the article the "some14charstring" is the power settings for the 14 channels. It should have a "c0bfbbbbb9b7b7b7b5b5b5b5b5b5" hex value encoded in it. Just change it to "8080...." encoded and you now have 100mW. (YMMV)

lower power levels=better security, oerhaps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that not only can you -increase- the power, you can decrease it too! "Why on earth would you want to do that?!?!" you say.

Just think...the AP that was suddenly accessible from the road is barely accessible from the front lawn. Maybe you use your AP within a pretty close range etc...lower power levels would be just fine.

The linksys also allows you very fine-grained control over supported data rates etc; experiment with, say, turning off everything except 11mbps and tweaking the power level down one notch up from where you start to see packet loss etc. Tada, maybe now your network that was visible from the street is only visible from the yard or front door. Granted, some antenna-kiddie(ooo, I coined a new term!) is still going to find the AP when he points a directional your way, but oh well...at least it'll maybe discourage the average moron who recides to go driving with his laptop.

Not to mention, if you're nervous about scrambled brain, having the AP at a lower power level might make you feel better, although the card is what is closest to you...

Re:Better range increase..

[Anonymous Coward]

By increasing the sensitivity setting of my Linksys WPC11, I was able to significantly improve its performance, making it a very good card for use in amateur "War Driving." In fact, as far as I have seen it performs better than my Orinoco Gold's internal antenna. I have not seen the Windows driver for this card so I can't say if you are able to do that in Windows or not.

In fact, the best performing internal antenna I have witnessed so far is found in the Cisco-brand Aironet card.

Hack an external antenna connector onto a D-Link DWL-650 and you will perform better than any of these cards easily. A omnidirectional whip antenna or discone antenna are almost trivial to build, and a pringles can beam with fantastic gain might take you an hour to build.

Do NOT use BNC connectors (like many websites suggest) unless you want close to 1dB of loss at every joint. Use N-Type connectors. Do NOT use RG-58/U cable because it has 31dB loss per 100 ft. Make a tiny pigtail with an N-Type connector, solder it onto your card. Make your feedline as short as possible, and ideally order LMR-240 cable (manufactured by Times Wireless) which has pretty good characteristics at 2.4Ghz for a flexible cable.