Couple interesting WiFi tips
Dave over at the Asterisk Blog wrote up a few interesting tips for building home wireless networks. I’d like to point people who ask me questions about wireless networks to lists like this. His tips can deal with the questions like “why can’t I get a signal even though I’m not that far away?”, or “how come I can’t pick up my wifi signal in my shed 200 yards away?” Here’s a couple good ones:
If you?re using a cordless phone, replace it. Cordless phones are among the worst sources of interference for wireless networks. They tend to transmit at a higher power output than Wi-Fi gear, making them louder and therefore harder to talk over, and they tend to transmit frequently, especially when the handset and base station are separated.
The farther you are from your wireless router, the greater the potential for interference to block or to slow your connection. You can strengthen the connection with antennas or repeaters. Or, try using a power-line bridge to import the connection from your router, and feed it into a power-line access point.
[link]
Guide to Hamachi
I’ve recently started using Hamachi (as in, 3 days ago), and I’m now addicted. I haven’t seen such a useful app in years. Hamachi is essentially a personal VPN solution for putting any computers on a sort of VLAN configuration across the internet. You would install Hamachi on any computers you want to have access to one another, create a network with a password, and join the computers to that network. The magic of Hamachi really comes from the fact that it’s a UDP-based peer-to-peer system in which the connections are secured via the main Hamachi server(s). However, the third-party server is only used to secure the connection; no data passes through the Hamachi servers. Dead simple.
Here’s a complete guide on the basics of Hamachi.
Read more