- Joined
- Apr 30, 2007
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After having no wifi issues with Tiger, I was, like many sad to see things did not work as well with Leopard. Connection drop-outs, couldn't find a network, etc. After some tests I found the problem was with encryption. When I ran wide open, things worked fine. With encryption, problems and more problems. So I used mac filtering, thinking, "oh well, what are the odds that someone will spoof my mac address and use my network".
Fast forward to Snow Leopard. After hearing that Snow Leopard incorporated bug fixes for wifi issues I was excited and installed ASAP. To my HORROR not only were the problems still there with encryption, they were much WORSE and rendered the wifi all but unusable. I considered a return to mac filtering, but after some prodding by my wife to not do such a thing again. I decided to look back over my router's log to see if anything bad had been going on. To my disgust, I found that others HAD managed to access my network. All my equipment uses fixed ip addressing, and there is a small range of numbers near the beginning of the DHCP range that I do not ever use, from which several numbers showed activity. Yes, someone did spoof my mac, and used my network it appeared. Ugghh.....
Note: To anyone considering using mac filtering as "security", don't....
Anyway, after playing around with wifi / Snow Leopard, I was happy to learn that the solution was as simple as switching from WPA2 to regular WPA. Problem solved, no drop-outs or failures to connect to my home network.
So, this is actually an improvement over leopard, as it would not work at all with any encryption. I know this is just one man's experience, but if anyone else is helped by this solution, then great.
I understand WPA is still pretty much unbreakable, unlike wep which can be hacked with the right wifi adapter and software on windows, mac, and linux. I was able to hack my own wep network in fairly short order using a D-Link dongle and kismac. WEP is not worth much more than mac filtering, since anyone who can spoof a mac address can probably also hack your WEP "security".
So in the end, Snow Leopard has been a very nice upgrade.
Fast forward to Snow Leopard. After hearing that Snow Leopard incorporated bug fixes for wifi issues I was excited and installed ASAP. To my HORROR not only were the problems still there with encryption, they were much WORSE and rendered the wifi all but unusable. I considered a return to mac filtering, but after some prodding by my wife to not do such a thing again. I decided to look back over my router's log to see if anything bad had been going on. To my disgust, I found that others HAD managed to access my network. All my equipment uses fixed ip addressing, and there is a small range of numbers near the beginning of the DHCP range that I do not ever use, from which several numbers showed activity. Yes, someone did spoof my mac, and used my network it appeared. Ugghh.....
Note: To anyone considering using mac filtering as "security", don't....
Anyway, after playing around with wifi / Snow Leopard, I was happy to learn that the solution was as simple as switching from WPA2 to regular WPA. Problem solved, no drop-outs or failures to connect to my home network.
So, this is actually an improvement over leopard, as it would not work at all with any encryption. I know this is just one man's experience, but if anyone else is helped by this solution, then great.
I understand WPA is still pretty much unbreakable, unlike wep which can be hacked with the right wifi adapter and software on windows, mac, and linux. I was able to hack my own wep network in fairly short order using a D-Link dongle and kismac. WEP is not worth much more than mac filtering, since anyone who can spoof a mac address can probably also hack your WEP "security".
So in the end, Snow Leopard has been a very nice upgrade.