Dur­ing my recent vaca­tion I was asked to con­fig­ure the wire­less LAN of a friend. I com­plied and did as I was asked. At the same time I thought I’d share a few of the most basic things with you. Since the most com­monly used routers on the mar­ket today are 802.11g/802.11 draft-n routers, I will focus on them. Most of the fol­low­ing infor­ma­tion should be applic­a­ble to older mod­els (802.11b or 802.11a routers) as well, pro­vided the man­u­fac­turer has made the appro­pri­ate firmware avail­able. That said, let’s get started.

First thing you should do is to look for a firmware update, espe­cially if you own an older model. After hav­ing installed the lat­est firmware, you should change your default router pass­word which is almost always some­thing along the lines of “admin”, “pass­word”, “changeme”, “pub­lic”, “pri­vate”, or “1234″. A more com­pre­hen­sive list of default router pass­words can be found at Default Router Pass­words. Addi­tion­ally, most routers come pre-configured with an IP address of 192.168.x.y, where x stands for “0″, “1″, “2″, “8″, “11″, or “15″, and y mostly stands for “1″ or “2″. Note that some routers have an IP address of 10.0.0.z where z often enough stands for “1″ or “2″. A strong pass­word doesn’t really pro­tect your net­work but it should ensure that nobody will mess with your settings.

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