This is the first in a series of posts on various pieces of equipment, or gear, which I use when traveling. This flight, I'll make Gold Medallion with Delta, I'm already a Gold HHonors member, and I am closing in on Gold status with Marriott - so I've had those nightmare trips where nothing goes right from a tech perspective. I have, however, found a few pieces of equipment that are easy to work with and seem to make hotel life a lot more like home. One of those is the Netgear WRG101 Travel Router (on sale this week at Staples for $29.98 after rebates) (note: YMMV on the price)
I got this router about six months ago on the first of two trips to Missouri. The hotel I was staying in didn't have wireless, the desk was too small, and the cable provided was so short that I couldn't get any work done. I have a HUGE table I work on in my office, and when in hotels with wireless, I simply spread my stuff out on the bed, and sit in the middle and work. This desk situation simply wasn't going to work out (and let's not talk about the crappy Holiday Inn chair). I had to do something. I made a mad dash to Compusa, and found the Netgear WGR101 Travel Router. It was small, fairly inexpensive, and when I bought it, ran basically as an open wireless access point or with 128 bit WEP, which wasn't great, but it was OK at the time. (Netgear has since released updated firmware which allows you to use WPA-PSK encryption, which if used properly, is awesome)
This is a piece of gear which is not as intuitive as I would like. The manual is well written, but if you're in "scan docs and plug everything in" mode, may not be as helpful as you would like. The key piece of advice I would give is to purchasers is to pay very close attention to the yellow cardboard "getting started" card (mine lives in the case which comes with the router), and be sure you have the switch on the side of it set properly. If you ignore the switch, you would be better off trying to use a brick as a router, as that's about how useful the device will be.
Once you've spent a couple of hours setting up the router, getting comfortable with it, and know how to connect to the hotel network in single user mode, click on the "OK" screen, and then browse in encrypted multi-user mode, it's the best. Again, the setup takes some time and some technical familiarity with wireless networks - so if you've never set one up, this may not be the best product for you - but I love it.
On wireless, I've swapped all of my gear out so I'm using 802.11g on all of my home wireless. While the SRX/Rangemax stuff is appealing, I have a router, a repeater, and a print server I picked up cheap, and I'm not ready to throw another $500 at networking gear. My tips for using wireless (as well as public internet access) are as follows:
- DO make sure you're practicing safe computing. You should have the following, at a minumum, installed on your PC before you use public internet access:
- Current antivirus program (with current definitions), with monitoring enabled.
- Current antispyware program with current definitions, with monitoring enabled.
- Have windows firewall turned on.
- Use VPN connections (or a VPN service like publicvpn.com) when using insecure FTP or downloading e-mail messages to your PC.
- Don't install anything unless you're sure that it's virus and spyware free.
- Use the WPA-PSK-TKIP encryption scheme that comes with the router. You will also need a private shared key (63 printable ASCII characters). I'm currently using Steve Gibson's "Perfect Passwords" page to generate the password, then I copy the randomly generated password to a Word document on a thumbdrive. I can then use cut and paste to install this key whenever I need to input it into client software or into the router configuration.
- Don't put your router next to sources of potential interference in the 2.4 GHz band. These include commonly used things like microwave ovens, cordless phones, and electrical wires.
- Don't set your router up on the same channel as someone else. Get a program that will survey the existing wireless networks, and pick a channel noone is currently using.
- Change the default username and password on the router IMMEDIATELY (in this case, the default user is Admin, and the default password is, well, password. )
I hope you find this tool an interesting addition to your toolkit. My latest work trick is to use two laptops together over the router, and run MaxiVista on them to let the main one use the secondary laptop as a second monitor. If you're not using two monitors, it's a great productivity boost. The second laptop not only gives me a second monitor, it also lets me segregate my client data from the laptop I use for presentations. An added bonus is that I have a "backup" laptop to use when I'm on the road - mine is an Averatec 3.5 pound machine. I love it. Oh well, better go. My plane is boarding now.
