[GlobalNomad]

Hi,

Some of the windows laptop are having trouble getting onto my network.

- It has WEP password on
- It is set on b/g
- It is sharing the internet via NAT

It is still sharing the network fine threw my switch. But the windows laptops can't seem to get on, via the wireless.

Some of the windows laptops were having trouble before I updated the firmware. Now after I updated the firmeware they are all having trouble.

I really don't care about it , it makes some of my family think about getting a Mac .

But realy what am i doin' wrong?

[ghporter]

I'd put money on the problem being the WEP password. Apple defaults to seeing your password as ASCII data, while everybody else defaults to seeing it as hexadecimal. It's usually best to creat a real hex password and enter it (as hex) on everything. You can tell your AirPort software to see the password as hex by prepending a '$' (for the technically challenged,that means starting the entry with a dollar sign, but without the quotes).

Try just turning off WEP and see if the PCs still have the problem. If not, I'm 99.99% certain I'm right.

[GlobalNomad]

Yeah I fiddled with it a little bit and fixed it.

2/3 Windows Laptops (the don't have them by choice they school gives them to u ), have really **** cards. It only supports 40 bit Hex passwords. Well it turned out the 40 bit hex password was too long for the P.O.S.

It worked fine in my 12" PB.

Well I made the 40 bit Hex password a little shorter and now it works fine.

[ghporter]

It sounds like time to get the school to replace your cards with something from the current century. A 40-bit WEP key is almost trivial to break, while a 128-bit key requires a significantly larger amount of intercepted traffic before even attempting to break it.

FYI, there is no difference between "40-bit" and "64-bit" WEP keys. The 40 bits are the "secret" part of the key, while 24 more bits are generated for each session (though not very well, which is part of the insecurity of WEP). A 128-bit key is actually 104 bits of secret key, with the same 24 bits of session key. You can see how much better a 128-bit key is, because so much more of it is actually secret.

[GlobalNomad]

Yeah the cards are built into the laptops. I think they might even be on board . But i'm not quite sure. The school would only replace the cards if it was found to be killing students off 1 by 1 .

Now 2/3 of the windows laptops work fine.
However there is this old dell using a b card in its PCMCIA (think thats it) slot.

It is a D-Link AirPlus card. It is just acting so god damn stuiped! Funy thing is that it accepts 64, 128 and 256 WEP incription. I have never seen of 256 WEP incription. But it won't join the network.

[ghporter]

Check the DLink web site for suggestions on how to get the thing working. Any DLink wireless card that supports 256-bit WEP also supports their proprietary (I think) 22Mbps wireless protocol, which means the card aint' that old. It's possible that the laptop isn't up to handling the card; what model Dell is it, and what operating system is it running?

[GlobalNomad]

Originally posted by GHPorter:
Check the DLink web site for suggestions on how to get the thing working. Any DLink wireless card that supports 256-bit WEP also supports their proprietary (I think) 22Mbps wireless protocol, which means the card aint' that old. It's possible that the laptop isn't up to handling the card; what model Dell is it, and what operating system is it running?

The laptop was working fine just a couple of weeks ago. It was on the Airport Extreme with the 48 (64bit) WEP and was even using the printer on the Airport.

Its about 3 years old, so it should be alright.
I do some fiddeling a bit latter, damn mid term exams!

[tritonus]

Originally posted by GHPorter:
I'd put money on the problem being the WEP password. Apple defaults to seeing your password as ASCII data, while everybody else defaults to seeing it as hexadecimal. It's usually best to creat a real hex password and enter it (as hex) on everything. You can tell your AirPort software to see the password as hex by prepending a '$' (for the technically challenged,that means starting the entry with a dollar sign, but without the quotes).

Try just turning off WEP and see if the PCs still have the problem. If not, I'm 99.99% certain I'm right.

Can someone confirm the $ thing works.

I just disabled WEP for a new Zyxel ZyAIR WLAN card that couldn't connect to my AirPort Extreme b/g WLAN.

[tritonus]

Here's the solution to our problem. Worked for me!

"AirPort Extreme: Microsoft Windows Clients Cannot Connect to Encrypted Network (WEP)"
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107620

Tell the PC to use "Shared" authentification. "Auto" won't work (at least in my case).

"AirPort for Mac OS X: Third-Party Wireless Software and Equivalent Network Password"
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106864

Enter E.N.P. in HEX code.