I have a Linksys router. I went to the web interface to check some other settings and, out of curiosity, went into "Wireless MAC filter" to see what was there. (screen shot attached)
I guess the question now is, what are these numbers attached to? What makes Linksys add them by default?
Those are MAC (Media Access Control) addresses that router forbids to access wireless network you have. Every network card has MAC address associated with to be uniquely identified, in your case (if you do not configured it yourself) it blocks those addresses probably because they have tried to access or use your network. That's the way to prevent users from using your wireless network, if WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) encryption is used, then for knowledgeable people is very easy to obtain your password for wireless network access, and actually use it without your knowledge. It is advisable to use WPA-2PSK encryption instead.
You can check what encryption you are using, and ask us more... Thanks
A router cannot enable mac address filtering and add blocked addresses by itself. Obviously this was set up by somebody. If you dont know what these are and are sure that none of your own or family's machines are included, you can just remove them from the list. Actually you can even disable mac filtering, its not the greatest of protections around.
I'll probably disable the filtering. It's not a big thing. And, I already understood what MAC numbers were. However, I have owned this router since new, and have never made entries into the list of restricted addresses. It's a mystery, but not one that affects anything important. Thanx guys.
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