Choosing the Equipment

The bus ride home was uneventful for Saul. He was tired and hungry. Saul walked straight to his room to go back over all the information he had gathered over the last couple of weeks. Sitting on the bed, he pulled out his laptop and papers and inspected what he had.

There was the map of the area around the hospital and the propagation of its wireless network. He had the username and password of a hospital access point. The Nmap scans of the wireless network that identified the access points was on his laptop along with the traffic he had managed to capture from his sniffing activities. All in all, it was a successful day, but the hard work was just getting started.

The fact that the hospital was using AP-1000 hardware for their network meant that Saul needed to use the same hardware for his rogue access points. It wasn t required, but using the same hardware made the work a lot simpler. With time being a huge issue there was wisdom in keeping things simple. Saul decided he would ask for more AP-1000s to maintain consistency.

The choice of antennas was fairly easy as well. The space around the hospital was wide open due to the plaza and Saul knew that meant that he could use a higher gain antenna. This would effectively expand the range of the wireless signal. He opted to use standard 8dbi gain omnidirectional antennas. Omnidirectional antennas would allow the wireless signal to travel in a 360 degree circle around the antenna.

So Knuth needed to know what Saul needed. He decided it wasn t prudent to tell Knuth all the details he had over e-mail, just in case the administrators at the hospital were nosey. Instead, he decided to keep it simple.

 Knuth, The project is going well. Thank you. I need the following supplies to complete it.  5 Lucent AP-1000 access points  10 ORiNOCO Gold wireless PCMCIA cards 5 8dbi omni antennas that operate in the 2.400  2.440 Ghz range with N type female connections 5 pigtail connectors with an ORiNOCO connection on one end and an N type male connector on the other. Saul 

He finished typing his e-mail to Knuth and hit Send. It had been a long day and Saul was ready for dinner. Contacting his friends for help placing the new access points could wait until tomorrow. For now, he was going to get some food and relax.