Airport: stability vs. security - help please

[hazmat]

My roommate and I in the apartment have DSL. The DSL modem runs into my SMC Barricade router. My G4 867 with 10.2.2 is off a hub off the router. My roommate got a Powerbook with 10.2.2 and snow ABS. He doesn't know much about networking, so I set it up. When I first opened the admin utility it asked to update to 4.07, so I let it. I disabled it giving out IPs, so his Powerbook's IP will be assigned by the SMC so we are all on the same subnet, or whatever you would call it. Since I don't want anyone but us being able to connect to the ABS, I set in the Access tab that only his machine could connect. As extra security, I named the network in it and checked off to only show up for computers requesting the computer name. After these settings, his wireless connection from the Powerbook is very flaky. Fine without the settings. Having read about problems with the latest ABS firmware, I had the admin utility revert to 4.06. Still was flaky for him. I then set the security settings back to default and his connection was fine from there. Anyone know what is going on? I obviously don't want to leave it open for anyone to connect.

Thanks.

 

[tosk]

Not just ANYONE can connect to the ABS for access. You CAN set the ABS to ask for a user and password before it finalizes its connection. Plus you can further restrict access by utilizing the networking tools you've got.

Make sure the ABS is set to grab an IP from the DSL router using DHCP. NOT using DHCP with a manual IP address. Then make sure the clients are set for the same.

Or to get into the nitty-gritty, you can set static IPs for maximum security and disable DHCP on the router. Plus if you set the static IPs up on a Class A subnet, anyone wanting to use the ABS would have to know what subnet they have to be in, and that would literally take millions upon millions of man-hours to calculate since a properly subnetted Class A network can have in excess of 65,000 possible usable subnets.

But anyway...