I finally decided to join the 21st century and set up a wireless network at home. I was a little apprehensive at first because my ISP is Comcast cable, whom I knew I couldn't count on for support. Luckily the setup went pretty smoothly.

The first hitch was that I had foolishly neglected to power-cycle the cable modem before plugging in the wireless router (NetGear WGT624v4). The cable modem registers the MAC address of whatever it's plugged into, so you need to shut it off for 30 seconds before you plug in something different like a new wireless router. Once I did that, everything worked fine with the default settings. Then I changed the router admin password and enabled encryption (it's amazing how many unsecured wireless networks you can find in my neighborhood with iwlist scan). On the client (Debian) side all I had to do was install wireless-tools and wpasupplicant and then appropriately configure /etc/network/interfaces and /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf.

A second problem, that I didn't notice right away, was that my ssh sessions started timing out after five minutes or so. That was the wireless router, "helpfully" terminating my idle sessions. To fix that, I appended the line ServerAliveInterval 240 to my /etc/ssh/ssh_config. That makes the ssh client send a keepalive signal every four minutes to avoid timing out.