Did I mention we are hosting a Sonic.net wireless hotspot? Well we are. I doubt that we will make any money off of it, because a. I haven’t told my neighbors about it, and b. I’m not sure how technically inclined my neighbors are.
In any case it allows me to have a secure wireless network in my house. The connection goes through an IPSec tunnel, so there’s no eavesdropping, and is authenticated on the Sonic.net side, so I know who is using my connection. Also the wireless network is on its own network seperate from the private LAN; which makes me feel better about using the usually insecure medium that is wireless.
For those interested I have some code to add to the Cisco VPN client start up script. It is real basic, it just checks to see if the wireless network you are in is the Sonic.net one, and if so start up the VPN client, otherwise don’t. This way I can roam to different hotspots and not have to hassle with bringing the VPN connection up or down, it is all just automatic. Keep reading for the code.
# See how we were called.
case "$1" in
start)
# don't do any of this if there isn't a wi-fi interface up.
# and the SSID needs to be Sonic.net
SSID=`iwconfig | perl -ne '/ESSID:"(\S+)"/ and print $1'`;
if [ "$SSID" != "Sonic.net" ]
then
echo "SSID is not Sonic.net";
exit;
fi