So then, you’ve got the “Fastest Package” for the Verizon FiOS ultra high-speed fiber optic. A whooping 50 Mbps download speed and a 20 Mbps upload speed! That means 802.11b WiFi routers won’t even be able to handle those speeds! Nevertheless, that possible 11 Mbps bottleneck should not be your only concern. If you’re going to be utilizing a number of network intensive applications (*coughGnuettllaEmuleBittorrent*) you’ll need to make some other adjustments to your hardware and software network setup. This is one of many things you can do to optimize the network. However, it is the first thing I try to remember when setting up any node or router on my home network.

Possible Names

This setting has many names. You can look for “Maximum Ports,” “Maximum Number of Connections,” “Max Active Links,” “Max Half-open/Duplex Concurrent Connections,” etc. Like the names imply, this setting controls how many connections can be established between nodes. Why is this important? It allows the client computer to contact many more server hosts at the same time. Off the top of my head, this would be beneficial to multi-segment download managers programs like DownThemAll!, Internet browsers (especially with multiple tabs), and (lower voice) P2P file sharing programs.

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A couple of months ago, I published my previous Wi-Fi penetration article about “Aircrack/Aireplay-ng Under Packet Injection Monitor Mode in Windows using a Virtual Machine of Backtrack Linux.” Really, there was still no complete sever from Linux with this scheme … until now. I didn’t realize that there was an easier way to use aircrack-ng in Windows and at the same time completely break free of Linux. Hours after I released that article, a reader left a comment telling me that somebody already wrote a less complicated method, “How to Packet injection Aireplay-ng & Windows XP” at airdump.net.

Summary

Ultimately, the premises of this hack works like this. With a slightly modified DOS/Windows-ported compilation of the most cutting-edge (actually beta) Aircrack-ng suite and a monitor mode compatible WiFi driver, it is possible to essentially inject packets in Windows with no middleman of a virtual machine (as mentioned in my previous Backtrack article). The original article at airdump.net actually provides the recompiled Aircrack-ng suite and the stripped CommView WiFi driver in a nifty little package.

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When I was in high school, I used to be involved in the desktop publishing department. Essentially, I was a yearbook geek. In most places, you receive your yearbook towards the last month of school. I’ve even heard of some schools distributing yearbooks from the previous year in August! In addition to the regular yearbook, our academy released a “pre-yearbook” in the first month of school so we can get used to all the (few) new faces. I’ve also attended other institutions with a similar publication. They called it “The Dating Catalog” or “The Mugshots.” We called ours the “JCA Buddy List.” That year, we designed the pages in sharp color as opposed to the previous year’s blurry black-and-white.

When the cutting-edge design was complete, I went into production. It took forever to print my “Buddy List!” “Forever” comprised of a whole 15 minutes. I checked the “Print Status” window and discovered the problem. Each side of the page I sent to the printer was at least 50 MB large! It wasn’t actually the printing that took long but the sending of the data. We used a high-grade laser printer. Printing one page took approximately 5 seconds. But sending the data via USB 1.0 cable - which is capable of “fantastic” burst speeds of 12 Mbps - took at least 1 minute!

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