Gateway 7000 Series Ideal Security Solution for Small Office.
Gateway's 7000 service access points include all the security and
authentication that an office of 5 to 25 users need: Gateway released
its two 7000 series models a few months ago and have received very
little press. The unit comes in 802.11g ($299) and 802.11a/g ($399)
configurations. It sports support for all the popular standards,
including 802.1X passthrough, WPA-PSK, WDS (Wireless Distribution
System), and others. It even includes two separate wide-area-networking
(WAN) interfaces: if you have a separately segmented guest wired
network, you can physically connect the device through the guest
interface to your public WAN and the private interface to your private
WAN. The device can segregate all wireless traffic. It can also do this
using Virtual LAN (VLAN) tagging by providing multiple SSIDs that are
logically separate for guest and authorized user: the traffic is routed
by your VLAN switch or system. But the real winning feature in this
unit is its built-in RADIUS server that supports both WEP and WPA over
802.1X using PEAP (Protected EAP). Because Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.3
both include PEAP, and it's possible to use PEAP affordably on other
platforms including Linux and Solaris, PEAP is currently the broadest
standard to support. Effectively, using a $299 or $399 device, you can
have enterprise-level security without a separate RADIUS server or the
administrative overhead. But it only supports a handful of users. I was
interested immediately in this built-in server aspect, and received a
review unit some time ago, but was unable to get past some initial
confusion in configuration. I started from scratch today, using the
factory defaults reset button, and had no problems whatsoever with the
same instructions, software, and firmware, so let's attribute my
earlier issues to user error. The device is extremely easy to
configure. I followed the directions and powered up the unit, plugging
my wired LAN into the LAN1 port. I ran the auto-configuration software
that finds the access point. It assumes that you have a DHCP server
running and this software handles the discovery of the 7000 series IP
address. You click a link in the software to open a browser and enter
the default passwords to connect. Once connected, there's very little
to configure for an ordinary network. I went to the User Management
section and created an account for myself. I then clicked on the
Security tab under the Advanced section and… [Wi-Fi Networking News]