but those were useful features!

[cellio]

A very helpful (yes, really!) technician at Verizon diagnosed our network problems as a flaky router, so he sent us a new one and we swapped it in today. The old router had two features that I found useful: I could name devices on the network, and the "my network" list showed me everything that had connected since the last router restart, not just the currently-connected devices. These, particularly in combination, were useful for monitoring my network. (Why yes, since I can be punished for anything done from my IP address even if I didn't do or authorize it, and since no security that is still usable is perfect, I do care.)

The new router lacks both of these features; it shows currently-connected devices by MAC address (and IP address), but short of my maintaining the name-MAC mappings externally, that's of limited utility. And it doesn't tell me if a neighbor found his way onto my network while I wasn't watching. Now my neighbors seem like decent folks, and in a different legal environment I'd rather be the sort of person who shares my spare bandwidth with anybody who needs it, but that's not the point.

Oh well. I guess I am now relying more strongly on decent neighbors and passwords, as I haven't found anything like router logs that tell me this stuff.

I know that some of my readers are pretty security-conscious. How do you handle this?

Comments

[cellio]

Thanks for all the good info. Yes, we're using WPA2 and we renamed the network. (I considered naming it something like "NSA Observatory" but didn't.)

That's a good point about only having to enter the passwords once per device. Even on the terrible Roku interface (merle_ is right about that) that's manageable.

Do you happen to have a recommended syslog application for OS X? (Asking only because I know you're a Mac user; if not that's what Google is for.)

[brokengoose.livejournal.com]

OS X has a built-in version of syslogd, though like most modern unixes, it doesn't accept remote logging by default. There are a few web pages out there that seem to describe the process. This one looks like what I remember doing:

http://meinit.nl/enable-apple-mac-os-x-machine-syslog-server