How to locate an Airport base station ?

Hi,

I have found that I can connect to some Airport base station close to my
home.
Very convenient and fast access to the web.

Thanks so much ... but to whom ???

I would like to know who is maintaining this station so I can make a deal
with him/her
and make sure this access remains open to me.

Is there a way for me to locate the Airport's owner or notify him/her that I
want to get in
touch ? Thanks for any help. I am running OS X.3.2 and am located in Western
Switzerland.

CAB

 

There's no way to contact the owner through the base station. The only
way to find out where it's located is to triangulate its location.
Using a Powerbook or iBook, walk around with the computer while watching
the signal strength. By watching how it changes, you should be able to
zero in on the location.

 

It's the old game of Hide the Thimble. "Your getting warmer, warmer, ooo,
you're *hot* now!"

 

Actually, trying to locate a printer is an interesting and creative
solution. If you printed a short, friendly message, really they ought
to be grateful to you for pointing out their security hole. But they
might not be so pleased, so be careful what you do.

 

But don't use 127.0.0.1, lol.

What IP range does AirPort assign?

 

Get a copy of MacStumbler or AP Grapher, and then walk around with your
laptop (assuming you have a laptop You should be able to find
either of these utilties via http://versiontracker.com/macosx/

I used this approach just this weekend to figure out which of my
neighbors were running an open network and contacted them suggesting
they implement a password on their WiFi (I already have high speed
internet and was just trying to help my neighbor).

Bob Harris

 

I'm curious -- did they thank you? One of my co-workers tracked down
an open Airport at work, and was met with quite a hostile response.

 

That page will show all printers available to the Mac. So if the remote
system has Mac OS X printer sharing on, the remote printer will show up
on that page.

 

That page will show you all the printers that the Mac has been configured to
work with, doesn't it? I've never seen it properly do resource discovery.

 

Steven Fisher a écrit :

Well Rendezvous does. I even see CUPS on my FreeBSD picking up shared
printers on a roaming iBook.

 

Not really. Then again, I spoke to the wife, but it was the husband
that was the user, so she didn't really understand the issue. She was
kind of cool to the news.

The good news is that our neighborhood is a rather quiet suburb, so
there is low risk of anyone doing anything nasty via their open wifi
port. They are much more at risk from running Windows

Bob Harris

 

Ah, that's quite different than the reaction my co-worker got. It was
-- I know, I keep it that way so visitors to my office can work with me,
and mind your own g***** business

 

We've noticed two or three open WiFi networks in our neighborhood; one
of them is easy to locate--the network's name is their house number.

 

We live in a condo - all the WiFi networks in the complex are identified
by the resident's last name. It wasn't pre-determined or anything. We
did it first, and everyone else just did the same thing.

 

I live in a townhouse development, and the WiFi networks have names
like "linksys", "Dave Home", "3Com" and "snorknet". Enough of my
neighbors are WiFi and cordless phone users to create really annoying
interference.

So I logged in to all the open ones and set them all on the same
channel as one of the closed ones, then changed the passwords on the
routers. Oh, wait, no, that would be wrong . I actually bought an
802.11a AP and card.

 

Chicken

 

Well, I might have done differently if I'd been able to figure out how
to hack into the cordless phones .

 

Thanks to all for your answers and hints !

I have not been able to find anything useful. No printers show up in
RendezVous, so maybe
there are none or they were off at the times when I checked.

 

Try "Connect to Server" and see if it lists and Mac or Windows servers.
Their names might give you a clue (since a lot of computers get named
"Dave's Mac" or stuff like that).

 

I tried to connect using "Connect to Server", but the "browser" window does
not browse
at all ! It seems to require the exact server's name. Or maybe this just
means there are
no servers on that network...
Or can I write something like afp://* or smb://* with the wildcard * ? I
tried but without
success.

I also tried the Network Services app, without success either.

I have OS X.3.2, was there any change to the behaviour of the network
browser ?

CAB