Geekyfied Christmas

Yesterday, when I was doing some PowerShell coding and drinking some Amarula (yes, those two activities mix very well ), I had a brilliant idea which I immediately had shared with my dear pal Dalle.

Right now, the weather in Sweden sucks and it doesn’t feel like December at all. No snow, no cold, no snowball fights, noting! So why shouldn’t we have our own Christmas calendar here at PowerAdmin for IT-Pros and post each day a way to increase the Christmas sprit in people using different IT technologies?

Herby I declare "Geekyfied Christmas" – Part 1! In this post we will:

"Send Christmas greetings to people using a enterprise access point and two meter long 15 dB antenna using WLAN’s!"

WLAN’s is a wonderful technology. It is a wireless freedom that can actually be almost as secure as a cable if you are a friend of PKI, 802.1x, RADIUS, IPSec, etc just like I am.

The good thing with WLAN’s is that you basically have the support for it everywhere. Even my girlfriends Wii has a built in WLAN card. So instead of sending e-mail (a.k.a spam) to a lot of people that we don’t know, why not try to spread our Christmas spirit using WLAN’s?

First we need a access point. At the moment I have a couple of D-Link DWL-3200AP access points at home.
We used them at work for some time ago, but right now we don’t need them there. So I have decided to dedicate one of them for my little project here.

One of the DWL-3200AP’s I have at home.

Secondly we need to configure the access point. Since we want to spread some Christmas joy using WLAN, we change the SSID to “Merry Christmas everybody! ” We can also configure WPA2 Enterprise on it. But we specify a random RADIUS secret and point the RADIUS server to the access point. This will deny any connection attempt since the access point can not communicate with the RADIUS server. (No shit Sherlock!?)

Not that complicated. DWL-3200AP is using a very user friendly web UI.

The only reason I configure the access point like this is to prevent the poor script kiddies in my neighborhood to do ARP sniffs on the broadcast domain, which would happen if the network was open (I have also been 15 once ). However, this AP will NOT be connected to any physical network segment!

We are pretty much done. However, a problem we have with our access point is that it comes shipped only with a 2 dB antenna. We need someting more… powerfull!

Since 2006 I have had a ANT24-1500 at home (don’t ask why!). It is without a doubt D-Links biggest WLAN antenna! Here is a picture of me and my dear friend Christoffer “Chrisse” Andersson with it at a party @ my place last year:

Trust me, it is huge!

Since I already have a ANT24-1500 at home, lets connect it to our little access point to be able to boost our signal “a bit”. We remove the original antennas and connect the ANT24-1500 antenna using a RP-SMA connector.