On Fri, 2011-10-14 at 18:06 -0700, Paul Allen Newell wrote: > All I have to do is convince them to do MAC access filter list and > I'll be happy. MAC filtering is utterly pointless. It *cannot* stop someone who wants to connect, it's completely impossible, because they can easily change their MAC to be the same as one that you've already allowed. There is just no way for it to be able to enforce what you think it will do. MAC filtering can cause users a lot of grief, because they expect to be able to connect and only have to supply a password. So, if they bring in another computer, they don't understand why they can't connect, and they're faced with having to reconfigure a device that they don't understand. In the meantime, they'll probably do a factory reset on the router, trying to resolve the problem, and end up turning off *all* security (the default settings of most home modem/routers; and it's commonly the default action of a clueless user trying to allow something, to go ahead and allow everything, and leave it that way). Broken networking does not equal more secure networking. And it's a trivial matter for someone only slightly clueful to configure their computer to connect to a network (i.e. an untrustworthy person), there are hacking tools designed for the idiot hacker to play with. It may not be a trivial matter for someone who just doesn't understand anything to do with networking (i.e. the normal users of the network) to figure out what to do with it, who aren't going to try to research how to hack their network. It's a waste of time to set up a MAC filter, and it's a further waste of time to have to fiddle with things to let a new computer connect up. The only use I'll make of the MAC addresses is for programming a DHCP server, so that particular computers always gets given the same IPs. It makes various networking things, particularly Windows SMB, much easier to cope with when their IPs are always the same. -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -r 2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686 Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
