should I go w/ wireless lan?

I'm trying to do some reading on wireless lans, and how insecure they are, or even how to secure one at all, and not getting very far.

What do you guys think about wireless lans at home, and are there any really good wireless community/how-to sites around?
I'm no stranger to networking, but I'm at a loss here.

For security wireless lans are not the way to do........ I know some guys who just drive around looking for wireless lans to see if they can pop into them... some of the encryption is pretty low so a powerful laptop can crack it in a few hours... but as long as your not worried about someone using your bandwidth I like it. I use it for my laptop and I get wonderful freedom around the home

How about a setup like this:
internet -- linux gateway -- wireless ap

The linux gateway could use ipchains to disallow any outgoing packets from all ip's except 1 or 2 that I designate.

Is this the best way to go?
Someone would have to guess the ip address I picked, if I don't use dhcp internally.

What you need is a wireless ap gateway to where you can do one of several things.

1) Run it at its highest encryption
2) Lock it down to the hardware ID of your wireless cards

There's some other things you can do I'm sure but I'm not really hard core into wireless security or breaking it but I do know you reduce your chances greatly by locking the wireless down to just your specific cards. Each network card, wireless card etc has a hardware address or mac id, while that still can be spoofed its much harder to do than other ways to intrude a wireless network if its not locked down.

Don't forget to lock down your connection on the outgoing side as well. Filter outgoing as well as incoming traffic with your firewall, and set up a proxy server with a password.

Treat the wireless link like you would the internet. You can't trust connections coming from it, you can't trust connections going out to it. Firewall everything that's going to be connected to it (even your laptop), make sure you have to use a password to make a connection across it, and make sure all traffic through it is encrypted.

And remember, locks are there to keep honest people honest. No matter how much effort you put into security, it will never be fool proof. The goal is to make your network sufficiently difficult to break into that it's not worth the effort.

Right on. Thanks, guys.
I might post some questions in the linux forum, since that's what I'd be firewalling with.
I'm not too familiar with how to filter based on mac addresses, but that's what manuals are for.