Home network

With a bit of sustained wireless use, sitting in the conservatory (roughly diagonally opposite the base-station and through the central chimney stack and rear wall) I did observe a few drop-outs, where I needed to manually force a re-acquisition; and depending how I sat, the bandwidth varied between 1 and 11Mb/s. This is with a Netgear DG834G "everything in a box" as the base station, and a basic Linksys WPC11 PCMCIA wireless card, running 128-bit WEP.

The recent weather has also been affecting the line - the ADSL modem logging at the DG834G showed a number of seamless reconnects of the ADSL circuit.

The logs also show that every few hours there are a couple of handle-rattling incidents on ports 139 (Netbios i.e. file shares) and 3127 (officially, according to the IANA, this is the registered port for CTX Bridge Port, but IRL, part of the port range that the MyDoom virus family accepts on) from different IP addresses in the same Class A block, which the firewall component has dropped. I'm still running ZoneAlarm on all the connected machines as well, so in effect treating the internal network infrastructure as DMZ, which it certainly would be if I do the geeky thing of running an externally visible web-server.