Do you know of a hardware routing solution that would allow me to leave my
MAC filtering open, but still allow for authentication with a simple dialog box that asks for
username and password before it allows connection to my network?
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Kate Gerwig, Editorial Director
While there may be an easy answer to your question I do not know of a routing product that
will accomplish what you are looking for. You have brought up what happen to be the big problems of
wireless, authentication and access control. What you might consider doing is placing a multi-homed
PC between the Internet and the WAP. Then have the users authenticate to the server before they can
gain access to the Internet. However the drawback is that if you're not using MAC filtering or WEP
the internal connection is still wide open for others to bang away on. While there are some product
to secure wireless, such as what hotels use, they may be price prohibitive for you
implementation.
This was first published in June 2004