I am just a dumb college kid who works in a chem lab on my campus. My school already has a wireless network and my boss wants to network all the lab computers together so he can access files from each of them and vice versa. My question is this: Could I just buy some pci wireless cards and use my school's wireless network but make a new workgroup for the lab computers and then put an individual password on each of those computers? And if so, how secure would that be? (My boss wants it so that only the people that work in the lab have access to it) OR, should I buy a wireless hub and some cards and create a new wireless network and encrypt it that way? Thanks, Dumb college kid

You can buy a bunch of pci wireless cards as long as they are WiFi compliant, and the schools wireless access points are WiFi compliant. Which most are. WiFi is a compliance generated by a group of major manufactures like Cisco, 3Com, Lucent, etc. that got together and said, okay, instead of having propriatery stuff and nobody playing with anybody, lets all agree to joint standards so everybodys stuff talks to everybody else stuff. It works like a dream. As for security, wireless is notorious for NOT having strong security. It is weak at best but what you want to do is 1) assign password, and 2) enable WEP. WEP is an encryption key. Any device not configured to match the encryption key will not talk to the device. Now, your going to get post from others saying how weak WEP is, and it's true, WEP can be cracked, but honestly the cracker has to be sophistacated and generally have a desperate need to crack it, as the cracking requires time to analyze a large volume of wireless traffic to crack it, and most hackers are not going to spend time sitting around trying to crack into a chem lab for gosh sakes. Long story short, WEP would be equivalent to putting a lock on your door. You could get infared laser beams and crap but do you really think you need that kind of security. If you do, get 802.1x, or use VPN with your wireless devices. I sale all this stuff, I can get you a good price. Good Luck D