Out of the Blue

Had a bit of frustration yesterday, as I brought my laptop and its nifty new wireless adapter to my buddy hoosier_dadi's house to try to connect to his wireless network, which runs off of one of those Apple Airports. After trying and failing to get it running with the Airport's WEP encryption enabled, we managed to get it connected with WEP shut off, and subsequently got it to inexplicably work with WEP turned back on. If that wasn't enough to set off the F.M. meter, it then ceased to work again for whatever reason. Some poking around on some support forums show that getting PCs to connect to Airport networks is a trick that plenty of other folks have problems with, so this shouldn't be too surprising... I guess I'm surprised that over the years cross-platform operations have progressed to the point where we had any expectation that this could work in the first place.

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WEP Airport & PCs
Nov 23, 2002, 11:56
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WEP Airport & PCs Nov 23, 2002, 11:56
Nov 23, 2002, 11:56
 
Is usually very easy to enable Windoze laptop cards on an Airport station: the whole point of 802.11b is that it's a cross-platform standard... The trick is to generate a password for WEP on the base station with a Mac, and the software will make the Hex key for you. Then you have to copy this Hex'd version of the password into the PC card's settings (usually in a place called Key #1). Then you should be able to connect.

You might have a problem if your laptop's card can't do encryption, but any recent card should be able to do at least 40bit. Check out Macwindows for more good info on this: http://www.macwindows.com/airportpc.html

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