Silly windows xp behaviour

Gerry

Hi, I'm pretty new to wireless, and I find win xp very frustrating. In our house, we use 128bit wep. When I try to configure the connection in xp, it says the key must be 40 bits or 104bits. ( this is when I paste in the 128bit key ) When I try to use the 8 char passphrase which generates this key, it says the passphrase must be exactly 5 or 13 characters long. I had no problems getting onto this network with linux. Has anyone come across this? Its xp home sp2, and a netgear wg311 a/b/g mini-pci card. Any help appreciated. ( I suspect I wouldn't have this problem with win2k )

seamus

The only thing I can see is that an 8 character passphrase won't generate either a 64-bit or 128-bit key correctly, because there are too many and not enough characters, respecitvely (64-bit WEP passphrases only use 5 characters). Perhaps when you give Linux the passphrase, it pads it out to 128 bits?

The keys should only be 10 or 26 hex characters. As windows says, the keys need to be 40 or 104 bits - the other 24 bits are automatically generated - a type of checksum if you will.

Afaik.

paddy

Have a look around the net for Windows "Wireless zero configuration". It's included with XP for managing wireless connections.(It's known to cause problems)

HTH

Gerry

Well, the fact that the pass phrase doesn't work doesn't surprise me greatly, its on a 3com access point that this pass phrase is used to generate the key. But, I thought that when I pasted in the full key, that it would work. Will do some googling, cheers for the replies.

paddy

Is it all 3Com gear you are using or is it from different manufacturers? I was installing a ad-hoc wireless setup between a d-link pcmcia card today and a Belkin usb wireless nic and they would connect fine without encryption, but once encryption was used they would not connect. :mad:

Gerry

Yeah, its only the ap thats 3com. The card in my laptop is netgear. Still, it works in linux. I'm going to try trimming or padding this key now I think.

seamus

Gerry wrote:

Well, the fact that the pass phrase doesn't work doesn't surprise me greatly, its on a 3com access point that this pass phrase is used to generate the key. But, I thought that when I pasted in the full key, that it would work. Will do some googling, cheers for the replies.

Yeah I wouldn't be familiar with a lot of gear, and how they deal with WEP. That was just the thing that stood out to me when I read it.

yankinlk

paddy wrote:

Have a look around the net for Windows "Wireless zero configuration". It's included with XP for managing wireless connections.(It's known to cause problems)

HTH

Try turning off the service "Wireless zero configuration"