The Line Is Up

Yes, everything worked. The technician from Vivodi came around at the specified time. He was delighted to find my two flatmate-grrls there. The installation seemed to have gone fine. I was already looking out to get a wireless kit or some other means to get the net to my room. But then I came home and discovered that the ADSL modem is also a router and wireless access point. Nice.

Even nicer was the setup of the wireless: It was wide open. At least there was a password on the admin account, but the network was open and unencrypted, and the built in firewall was off. So as a first measure I set up that stuff a bit, WEP 128, MAC address registration, and the firewall will at least deter the lazier script kiddies. Anything important will have to be encrypted anyway to go over the line. At least my paranoia is well developped enough that I use PGP/GPG daily, have the firewall on my personal machine on and use encrypted protocols for everything I can. It would be cool to have a Soekris with OpenBSD to secure the wireless, but that is currently out of the reach.

Oh, and the technician was really happy to have my flatmates around, he gave them his phone number and reminded them to call him if they have questions. "Any questions! Just call me!" Yeah, sure :-)