The Linksys WRT-54G administration panel is able to show you all of the devices that are connected to your home network — if you know where to find this feature. The WRT-54G is an extremely popular router among people with broadband at home, but the option to see all active connections is hidden behind a few menus and some technical language that you might not understand.
Go to the Administration Panel
Open up a web browser window (Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, etc…) and enter http://192.168.1.1 into the address bar. You will be asked for the administrator’s username and password — if you have not changed these login credentials, then the username is “admin” and the password is “admin”.
Bring up the DHCP Clients Table
- Click the Status tab.
- A sub-menu will appear in the purple bar underneath the main tabs.
- Click Local Network in the new sub-menu.
- Click the button labeled DHCP Clients Table.
A new window will pop up and show you a table of all the clients who are connected to your home network. This list includes both wired and wireless connections… I titled this article “Home Wireless Network” because, well, I figure it would be a lot easier for you to notice a stranger jacked into your router.
The DHCP Clients Table shows the client host name, IP address, and MAC address associated with each connection. If you are in the habit of giving your PCs custom names through the Control Panel, it should be pretty easy to make out who’s who (and Macs automatically give your system an obvious name in the format “John-Does-Computer”).
Strange or blank client names may represent connections belonging to other devices in your home that are not traditional computers — gaming consoles such as Xbox or Playstation that support online gaming, for example. If you are worried about unauthorized users, make a list of every network-enabled device in your home, count them up, and compare them to the entries in the DHCP Clients Table. If there are more connections than you have computers/gadgets, that may be a clue that a stranger is connected.
Oh, and ultimately if you are worried about freeloaders, you should password-protect your WRT-54G’s wireless network.
