Mary Synn Ranara asked:




The Linksys Wireless-G Broadband Router is actually three devices in one box. First, there’s the Wireless Access Point, which allows you to connect both screaming fast devices such as Wireless-G (802.11g at 54Mbps) and Wireless-B (802.11b at 11Mbps) to your network.

Next, is a built-in 4-port full-duplex 10/100 Switch to join your wired-Ethernet devices together. You can connect four PCs directly, or attach more hubs and switches to make as large a network as you want. Lastly, the Router function links it all together and allows your whole network to share a high-speed cable or DSL Internet connection.

After your computers are linked to the Router and the Internet, they can interconnect with each other too, sharing resources and files. All your computers can print on a shared printer linked anywhere in the house. And your computers can share all kinds of files — audio, digital pictures, and documents. Save all your digital music on one computer, and listen to it anywhere in the house. Consolidate all of your family’s digital photographs in one place, to simplify finding the ones you need, and enabling backup to CD-R. Use spare free space on one computer when the other’s hard drives starts to fill up.

I got this wireless router from Amazon.com. When I installed it, the setup was very direct. (The Setup Wizard didn’t work for me). I altered the IP address series because the DSL modem uses the 192.168.1 address, set up an administrator password, then chose a name for the Wireless network, enabled WPA2 encryption and selected a pass-phrase.

Once I attached my laptop to the router, I established an outstanding signal and throughput of 100 KB/sec for evaluation, my DSL connection retains an output of 300 KB/sec when I link straight to the DSL modem.

I’ve been using the router for some months now, and have not had any plunged connections unlike my older router where it dropped connections objectively often and did not support the newer WPA encryption scheme and have steady output. The router has been running continuously for these past few months.

For the genuine tech-heads, this router has modified Linux firmware accessible from third parties. I haven’t tried this firmware, since the base Linksys firmware meets my necessities.

To finish, good security practices are to: Modify the administrator password, deactivate Universal Plug and Play, restrict Remote administrative access, use a distinctive name for the access point, and if the network is only for a minor number of personal devices.