Re: [SLUG] Cable/DSL routers

From: Greg Schmidt (slugmail@gschmidt.net)
Date: Tue Nov 12 2002 - 07:37:39 EST


On Mon, 11 Nov 2002, Smitty wrote:

> On Monday 11 November 2002 20:51, William Coulter wrote:
> > That is why I don't do wireless. There are way, way too many flaws for any
> > hacker to get in to the system and cause havoc.
> >
> > So why are all of the major companies making and pushing everybody to buy
> > wireless?
>
> It is a profit center and an emerging technology with higher margins than
> established technologies.
> Smitty

It can also be very dang handy. Imagine the conference/training rooms in
many offices. You could buy a bunch of extra CatV switch ports that will
go unused most of the time to wire up those rooms. That's expensive. If
you don't buy those extra switches, some poor LAN admin is at the patch
panel trying to figure out whose desk they can unplug to get the meeting
room wired when you have an event. That hardly ever goes smoothly.

The clients don't want to crawl on the floor in the meeting room to get
plugged in. They want these nifty fixtures on the sides or tops of the
tables with easy access. That means wiring the tables. Often, it means a
cheap hub bolted to the bottom of the table and that might not deliver the
streaming media message from the CEO with the quality you hoped. And then
they want to move the tables into "U"s and circles and rows, so some
poor LAN admin is moving furniture and patching cables. Since they seldom
learn how the people holding the meeting want the room configured ahead of
time, it often happens that the first 20 minutes of your meeting are spent
moving furniture and patch cords and trouble-shooting layer 1 problems.

I've seen people (Maybe they were sometimes women in skirts.) so loath to
get on the floor and plug in that they let their laptop batteries go
dead. If we could get batteries that last a week and recharge in half an
hour, or could deliver power over the air along with the network signal,
that would be REALLY cool.

If you have copper network ports on the tables, they need AC/DC bricks.
Those go missing. The cost of buying spare bricks is trivial compared to
the lost productivity when some poor LAN admin finally figures out they
need to unwrap another new brick.

If you have a bunch of CatV network jacks spread across the floor of a
large room, ladies' high heels can poke into them. The network jack is
broken. Her shoe might be broken. Hopefully, her ankle is fine.

I once saw where someone trying to be helpful had pulled a broken jack out
of the floor and twisted all the wires tightly together. I don't know if
they didn't want the Token to get out or if they were trying to keep the
bits from escaping into the Ether. Somehow, spanning tree didn't cut it,
and having all the LEDs on ALL the switches blinking in unison is only an
attractive or amusing sight in retrospect. (The LEDs seemed to be the
only functional aspect of the switches at the time.)

If network and power jacks in the floor aren't part of original
construction retro-fitting them can be very expensive. Core drills
through concrete floors are messy and noisy. Carpet might need to be
replaced. With some construction techniques you need to X-ray the floor
to decide where to drill. If you're not leasing the floor below you need
to inconvenience, and coordinate activities with, one of your landlord's
other tenants. Decent floor jack hardware costs much more than wall jack
hardware and many cable jobs are bid, or at least evaluated by folks who
might approve your project budget, as dollars/drop.

If you give up on jacks in the floor and keep them on the walls, a large
room will still have a bunch of cable running around posing tripping
hazards. Hazards to both your clients and their network.

Conference room problems aside, a wireless connection can be good
because it is persistent, even if it is a little slower. Someone can
carry their laptop from their desk to some other office or a conference
room, stop by the water cooler, realize their meeting is going to start
five minutes late so go get a cup of coffee (and make it 10 minutes late),
and all the while they are downloading their email.

Wireless can be a very good solution for situations where people don't
super-glue their laptops to their desks.

Finally, while sending your data through the air makes you more
susceptible to sniffing than sending across fiber or copper, it CAN be
done with reasonable security. Encrypt. Don't rely on the rather
inadequate security measures that come with the wireless products.
Encrypt everything you send before you ever drop it on any layer 1
medium and your wired part of the network will be more secure too. Let
the black hats get their Pringles cans and listen to your gibberish. And
to bring this back on to topic for this list, open-source solutions for
encrypting your transmitted data are superior.

The patch cord leash can be a real pain. Though it's far from perfect,
and it doesn't fit every situation, there is a good business case for
wireless.

Apologizing for my ranting,

Greg



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