Saturday, February 18, 2012

Wireless Administration

I know I have posted a few times about Wireless Printers and the costs of maintaining such devices but what I  am finding more often is the fact that wireless security is simply being overlooked.  Because you now own that wireless printer you are going to need to know your SSID and password for your wireless router but what is more important is having access to the administration of that router.  Since you purchased it, plugged it in and probably ran through the step by step 'easy setup', one thing that is quite often overlooked is the creation of the administration password to make changes to the router itself.  If you are like many clients of mine that are upgrading their internet to the latest and greatest 'high speed internet' which provides you with their own wireless router, this initial setup process may be done by the internet provider installer.  What is happening as I see it, is they are setting things up then providing the SSID and password to access that wireless identifier however what is not being provided is the administrator password, in which case it is either not set up at all, or has been set up as a default password that THEY are familiar with but you are not.. this is fine if you are planning on having a service tech come back to your home to make any changes and the only way around this is to reset the router at which time all of your settings are lost. This means unless you set it up again using the same SSID and password, you will have to reconfigure each device that connects to the wireless router such as your printer. If you have ever tried setting up some of these wireless printers from the small control panel on the printer itself, you will know it is NOT a lot of fun!   Therefore, before your internet provider technician leaves, be sure you have ALL THE PASSWORDS AND USERNAMES, not just what they initially give you and write it down so that when you do have issues and have some other tech helping you out, they will not have to first be resetting things and starting from scratch.. it will save a lot of time and leave your tech a few less grey hairs!