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EH21 · Jul 5, 2003, 10:27 PM

Hi,
Great forum here. Just joined and am posting my first question.

We have two powerbooks connnected to a aiport base station working fine. Now we just got a new housemate that has a PC running windows ME and a linksys wlan usb wireless adapter and the WLAN monitor software.

His adapter can see the airport get the base station name and id number. Signal is good but we can't get connected to the internet.

The settings that yield a signal on his pc are:
WEP 128bit encryption, channel 1, Infrastructure (instead of adhoc).
The software seems to generate a WEP key in hex but we have tried the '$' in front of password.
Have signal but can't get it to connect. This was so easy with my powerbook!
Pulling our hair out now. Can anyone offer suggestions?

Thanks in advance,
Eric Hiss

bsodmike · Jul 6, 2003, 12:36 AM

If you can't get the Linksys card to work, just plug him into the LAN port of your AEBS and he will have net access. No wifi tho!

In ME, set everything to work off DHCP and he'll be happy.

Mike

EH21 · Jul 6, 2003, 02:03 PM

Hi Mike,
Thanks for the suggestion. We did that already out of necessity and works okay but don't want to string 100' of cat 5 cable up the stairs and in and out of the windows. Seems like it should work since we see the base station id and get 97% signal. There must be some kind of setting we haven't configured or something.

Eric

ghporter · Jul 6, 2003, 07:08 PM

Have you turned off WEP to see is it works that way? That would be the first step. After that, assuming it's successful, you should try using WEP again.

You could try to have the housemate's Linksys software generate a new key (in hex) and enter it in your ABS, but since you have to deal with hex anyway, why not just generate a new key on your own. Use 0-9 and A-F and generate 13 pairs however you want. Dice, converting phone numbers to hex, whatever. Just make sure that the AirPort equipment knows you're entering a hex key and it should work fine-and remove any question about what's going wrong.

EH21 · Jul 7, 2003, 12:10 PM

Hi Glenn,
Thanks for the suggestion. We tried disabling WEP but could still not get the PC connected to the internet. On his PC Linksys software it shows the PC as being connected and signal but we could not get out to the internet. Any other ideas?

Thanks,
Eric

ghporter · Jul 7, 2003, 01:22 PM

It sounds like the PC has the same kind of problem where you connect the cable of a wired network to the computer, the lights on the card come on, but you don't get anything. That's fairly simple to fix. You go into the Network Properties and configure the wireless card to "obtain IP address automatically," then restart. (If the driver takes over the configuration of the card, just do the same in the driver's interface. That should do it for you. If not, we're here...