214
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How to find a router at an unknown location in a house?
You are going to laugh, but I was in the same situation. I could not find my mother-in-law's router as the cable company had installed it.
When my nephews came over they wanted to use WIFI on their ...
- 11.4k
201
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How to find a router at an unknown location in a house?
If you have a Android smartphone or tablet, you can use the WiFi Analyzer app. It has a screen dedicated to detecting proximity of access points:
Walk around the house and see where the signal is the ...
- 56.4k
152
votes
How to find a router at an unknown location in a house?
Barring an obvious wire leading to it, then searching by WiFi signal strength should be good too. But not the "walk around blindly with a strength meter" approach, use an app that will map ...
- 13.8k
128
votes
SSID with very similar name, is this an attempt of hacking?
Yes, it is most likely some kind of hacking ploy, although it's a guess as to why.
I do point out that locking your router down to specific MAC addresses might provide a tiny bit of security, but ...
- 69.6k
112
votes
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How does a router obtain its IP address?
Many people don't realise that a consumer "Router" is usually a number of components smushed into a single box.
The WAN / external ports are typically set to 'auto configure' using DHCP... that is ...
- 19.7k
111
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If my Wi-Fi speed is 64 Mbit/s why do I get nowhere near it?
Wi-Fi is half duplex and has more overhead than Ethernet, so you never see TCP/IPv4 thruput even as high as 80% of your physical signalling rate (known as a "PHY rate").
Plus, when sending wireless ...
- 103k
82
votes
Can you plug the computer directly into the wall to access the Internet?
If your "wall" output is really Ethernet which is possible if your "wall" is a fibre media convertor or Ethernet wired apartment (and not dsl for example) then it is technically possible to plug a PC ...
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80
votes
What is best way to share wifi with a building next door?
To be completely honest the best thing to do is get some armoured CAT6 cable and do it properly.
Wi-Fi might be "convenient" but over any real range it can be intermittent, affected by a whole raft ...
- 90.8k
78
votes
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Why are subnet-masks relevant for the individual computer on the network?
Your original assumptions are not entirely correct. What you call a "router" is two devices in one – a two-port router internally connected to a multiple-port Ethernet switch. (Here's an example ...
- 437k
69
votes
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I have a domain, static IP address and many devices I'd like to access outside my house. How do I route them?
You can have one public facing server running nginx reverse proxy that redirects traffic based on subdomain to the correct server.
nginx configuration on your "main" server:
server {
server_name ...
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65
votes
Accepted
How does my router resolve a URL like http://router.asus.com/ to its IP address?
Your router has its own DNS server. When you do use it online, it'll forward to your ISP's DNS, but it's also added its own entry at router.asus.com to point to itself.
As you're likely using DHCP, ...
- 21.1k
64
votes
Accepted
Why use half duplex at all?
Full duplex requires more than half duplex.
Typically full duplex is achieved by having two separate data paths. That means two sets of wires, separate sets of transmission and receiving electronics ...
- 90.8k
63
votes
Can a LAN adapter cause a whole home network to crash?
Yes, it's possible for an Ethernet device to sabotage the entire network. At work, a core switch died and started flooding the network with invalid Ethernet frames at ~700 MBits/s. This caused all PCs ...
- 61.6k
62
votes
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Why is the range of a mobile Wi-Fi hotspot shorter than that of a router?
Good question!
Basically the smartphone can't transmit a very powerful signal, but a router can "hear" a much weaker signal.
Wireless communication waves don't have a hard cutoff line, they ...
- 56.4k
57
votes
SSID with very similar name, is this an attempt of hacking?
It sounds to me that this is something called "Evil Twin".
Basically the attacker creates a network that mimics yours so you (or your machine all by itself) connect to that instead. He achieves that ...
- 681
56
votes
Wi-Fi stops working when I attach wireless mouse to my laptop
That's probably a 2.4 GHz wireless mouse and you're probably using 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, so your mouse is probably interfering with your Wi-Fi signals.
Try changing your TP-Link router's channel and ...
- 103k
56
votes
What does it mean to have a subnet mask /32?
/32 addressing
Generally speaking, /32 means that the network has only a single IPv4 address and all traffic will go directly between the device with that IPv4 address and the default gateway. The ...
- 4,578
52
votes
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How should I connect 7 devices to a switch module with four ethernet interfaces? Is there a preferred topology?
The thing to keep in mind is that the link between the switch and the router is shared between all devices trying to communicate across the link.
If:
the devices predominantly connect to the ...
- 1,907
48
votes
Accepted
Home ethernet - daisy chained
That's not wired for Ethernet at all. Don't be fooled by the presence of an RJ-45 and Cat5 cabling. They wired them both for analog telephone even though only one of them is RJ-11 (you can plug an RJ-...
- 103k
44
votes
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Is a class C private IP address range (or even class A or B) both theoretical and practical or is it just theoretical?
To start with, classful addressing has not been used since the mid-90s. Everything uses CIDR now, which allows splitting an IPv4 address space into any size from a /32 (2^(32-32) = 1 address) to /0 (2^...
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43
votes
Connect to internet with wifi, while wired to a different LAN through ethernet
The following is a step by step process as to how you can use wireless internet without taking out your ethernet cable out.
Open Network and Sharing Centre ("Network Status" Win10).
Go to "Change ...
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43
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SSID with very similar name, is this an attempt of hacking?
I ran into a similar "issue" earlier this year while debugging wireless connectivity issues.
My suggestion is a question: do you own a chromecast?
The connectivity issues ended up being entirely the ...
- 533
43
votes
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Home Networking: How can I have ethernet in another part of the house?
You could look into a wireless bridge (or WiFi bridge). This may be the component/term you're looking for in your situation. It's basically a reversed access point and it's a feature some WiFi routers ...
- 30.8k
39
votes
How to find a router at an unknown location in a house?
You can use airodump-ng to scan for wireless networks. Once you see the network you're interested in, close and reopen airodump-ng with the arguments --bssid ... and -c ... corresponding to the BSSID ...
- 1,002
37
votes
How can Internet speed be 10 times slower without a router than when using the same connection with a router?
The first two are easy to explain - you live in an area with a fair amount of Wi-Fi noise or are far away from the router or have a crappy router, so a wired connection is faster - indeed that ...
- 69.6k
36
votes
Is the public IPv4 address and default gateway for my home router owned by IANA?
You are looking at some
Reserved IP addresses:
In the Internet addressing architecture, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) have reserved ...
- 465k
35
votes
Accepted
How do routers get their external IP address?
Very much like how you have a local DHCP server running on your home router to serve IPv4 addresses on your LAN network (typically in the 192.168.1.x subnet), your ISP also has a DHCP server running ...
- 695
34
votes
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What does it mean to have a subnet mask /32?
There's a bit of confusion here; that /32 doesn't refer to the size of any (sub)network, but to the range of addresses that particular routing table entry applies to. Usually the two are the same (...
- 34.3k
34
votes
Is a hidden network with "X" security less secure than a non-hidden network with that same "X" security?
A hidden network is generally regarded as being less secure for the client.
A client seeking to join a non-hidden network is able to passively listen for the access-point to broadcast it's identity. A ...
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33
votes
Tablet and Wi-Fi AP can't agree on a channel. Which device is violating the 802.11n standard?
Who is violating the 802.11n WiFi standard?
Nobody. They just chose not to bother with all the complex regulations surrounding radio use. So they only support a subset of the available channels.
5 ...
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Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible