Better Living Through Thinking

Setting up a Wireless Gateway

Wed, 18 May 2005

I've had a wireless router behind my FreeBSD firewall for about 8 months now. It worked mostly fine except for the fact that I had to unplug and re-plug it in every other day. It's a Netgear WGB (fixme)

I thought for the longest time it had something to do with my DHCP server settings. I fiddled with those a little, dropping the TTL to something like an hour instead of 12 hours.

I fiddled with the NAT settings. I changed the named (DNS server) settings.

Not until I changed my wireless encryption options did things fall into place. I setup WPA on the wireless router; now I can open and close the laptop all day long. I can go away for days or minutes, and when the laptop wants wireless, it gets it. I haven't had to reset the router for a few weeks now, and (I'm told) I'm more secure than before. Nice.