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I live at an apartment complex which provided free wifi. My problem is I cannot get a good signal in my bedroom. In the living room my desktop (with a wifi Rosewill PCI-e adapter) gets an excellent connection, meanwhile my laptop which has had connection strengths on par with my desktop is struggling to maintain an identical connection 24/7. Most of the time both computers report 4/5 or 5/5 bars. However every so often my laptop drops to only 1 or 2 bars of signal which doesn't seem right.

I tried using the "dd-wrt" firmware to turn my working router into a 'wifi extender' or 'wifi amplifier'. That did work and gave me a strong connection from my bedroom for 1-2 days then it stopped working. Could the apartment complex some how have found this device and done something remotely to deactivate it?

Something else I found interesting is, on my laptop, when I get a bad signal, disconnect, then reconnect the wifi name changes by ++ and number to the end. ex: TP-WIFI -> TP-WIFI 2 -> TP-WIFI 3 and so on...

If anyone could help me out with any advice or suggestions I would be so grateful.

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Welcome to IT Security! I don't feel that your question really fits in the area that we try to focus on. Please have a gander at the FAQ, if you feel like it still fits then please clean it up to be clearer. Thanks! – Scott Pack Aug 25 '12 at 1:18

closed as off topic by Rook, Scott Pack, Rory Alsop♦ Aug 25 '12 at 9:55

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1 Answer

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It sounds like you are running windows 7. If you are running windows 7 examine it's naming convention for internet signals. That should solve the problem on your laptop.

For your repeater issue... No. If the complex found a way to block your signal (ie. render your repeater useless in repeating) you would lose all signal to the router which is acting as a DHCP server for your local devices. It sounds as if you have a configuration/DD-WRT issue causing your router to quit responding for potentially many different reasons.

None of these issues have to do with security and are configuration issues. My suggestion would be to run wireshark or similar program and examine the results.

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Thank you for your response James. And yes I am on Windows 7 I was not sure whether the complex could indeed block certain devices, like my laptop or router/repeater. I know this is a security board so the main focus of my question was: is there a way around the complex blocking me or, even better, not know what I am up to? Besides tunneling or using a proxy are there any other similar or related techniques I may be interested in learning more about. Thank you – Adam Johnston Aug 25 '12 at 10:56

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