So you're ready to build a wireless LAN in your home? Not sure where to begin? I think I can help out a little.

First off, what is a WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network)?

Its a group of networked devices in a close physical proximity of each other connected by means of wireless communications.

Wi-Fi is a marketing term used to describe products that conform to the 802.11 wireless communications standard. Most 802.11 wireless networking equipment that can be purchased on the market today will be Wi-Fi certified.

The three popular wireless standards today are 802.11a, 802.11b, and 802.11g. 802.11a is typically more expensive and used primarily in the business world.

802.11a runs on a higher frequency than 802.11b and that makes the range a little shorter and more difficult for the signals to  penetrate walls and other obstacles. 802.11a runs up to 54 Mbps in speed and signals in a regulated 5 GHz range.

802.11b is more suitable for home networks because the range is greater than 802.11a and the signals are less easily obstructed but only runs at speeds around 11 Mbps.

802.11g is the newer standard that combines some of the attributes of both 802.11a and 802.11b. 802.11g supports speeds up to 54 Mbps but unlike 802.11a it uses the 2.4 Ghz frequency for greater range more like 802.11b. Unfortunately lots of household appliances also use this range making signal interference more common on this unregulated signal frequency. 802.11g has backwards compatibility with 802.11b such that an 802.11g wireless router or access point would allow connections from 802.11b devices as well as 802.11g devices.

What is a Denial of Service (DoS) attack?

Well, its the most common form of security attack, the easiest to perform and the hardest to track down and stop. A DoS (Denial of Service) attack by design sends a large enough amount of traffic to a host, group of hosts or network in order to overwhelm the target such that it cannot properly respond to legitimate traffic.

Below is a list of common DoS attacks:

When routing full Internet tables which can hold more than 90,000 routes you need to rely on a very robust and highly scalable routing protocol. BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) is an interautonomous system routing protocol. An autonomous system would share common administration and routing policies inside of a network or group of networks. BGP is becoming the standard routing protocol for ISPs (Internet Services Providers) replacing the older EGP (Exterior Gateway Protocol). ISPs use BGP to route between other providers and or customer networks also running BGP. Many times ISP customers with use an IGP (Interior Gateway Protocol) to route their interior networks and will also sometimes use it to exchange routes with their ISP. If BGP is used inside of an AS (autonomous system) its referred to as IBGP (Interior Border Gateway Protocol) but when its used to route between AS (autonomous systems) its referred to as EBGP (External Border Gateway Protocol).

In order to handle large Internet routing tables BGP must use attributes in order to maintain stability and define routing policies. BGP also makes use of CIDR (classless interdomain routing) in order to reduce the size of the routing tables by using Supernets. By using Supernets many routes can be summerized into larger route blocks shaving down the size of the routing updates and routing tables tremendously.

VLAN is a term meaning Virtual Local Area Network. By "Virtual" its not a physical network segment but a logical network segment.