The AP War

I love wireless internet. I just love it. I love it so much that even tho telecommunication is ridiculously expensive in New Zealand, I still have my phone set up ready for wireless internet. I also persuade every friend of mine to have wireless internet in their houses, and more than often take the matter into my own hands and install one for them (albeit at their expense), so I can surf the net when I'm at their place.

One little problem in this perfect wireless world of mine, is that there's no wireless network in my lab. In fact, the whole university literally bans all internet activity save www, not to mention wireless network.

But that didn't stop me and I still put a wireless AP in my lab, and it soon became the little secret among lab members. I went great length to make sure the wireless network will never be discovered. Apart from the usual WEP encryption and MAC address filtering, I also named it "Private Wireless Network" and turned off SSID broadcasting. To say this in English, you'd need to be a VERY good hacker and extremely lucky to discover my wireless network and log on to it.

All this was done for Jo, my mortal enemy at the university. She's the computer maintenance person for the department, so while I try to do everything with the university network, it is her duty to stop me from doing so. We didn't like each other from day one. She thinks I was too rebellious and I consider she too bureaucratic.

So today she wandered into our lab, and noticed that my iBook doesn't have a network cable plugged in. Knowing me as someone who can't live without internet, she quickly came to the conclusion that I have set up my own wireless network. Sure enough, it didn't take her 5 mins to locate where the AP is, and brought her supervisor over trying to disarm it. Interestingly, her supervisor is much more reasonable, and was quite amazed at how secure the AP was; but that didn't stop her from taking a revenge on my treason against her. She cited the new university regulation saying that all wireless network need to be put outside the firewall, which basically means I can't access the university printers and file servers.

So here I am now, printerless and file-serverless. The irony in this little drama is that I put so much effort trying to make the wireless invisible, but in the end it was a missing network cable that compromised my efforts. I tried to prove myself superior as a geek, but she defeated me using completely non-geeky methods.

Now if you excuse me, I need to find a way to break into the firewall and print my next report.