Major Issues involving WEP and WPA

[Tommy1005]

Heres the situation..

I'm at a house with 7 guys in college and I just through away our crappy netgear router because lets be honest.. thats a joke. Anyways I got a Linksys router, and when I put a password "blahblah4blahblah" on it for WAP, everyone can connect to it perfectly, and there are NO problems.

However, one of my friends has a crappy old laptop and can't connect to WAP connections! He can only connect to WEP connections..

No problem, I'll just set our settings to WEP, and same password. Nope, the passphrase doesn't work, but whats weirder is that the keys I get from clicking on "generate" that are lik KJS87S27JSA7BSDJ9 work when I type them into the password box when trying to connect to my wireless signal, but its a real iffy signal and disconnects you all the time, and then you have to go back in the wireless advance properties and type in the huge generated key thingy again... Its a huge pain.

If my friends old laptop allowed him to type in WAP we wouldn't be having any problems..


So I need some help on what to do..

I guess theres two ways to fix this

1) Figure out why WEP is so messed up and doesn't allow the passphrase to work for anyone.

2) Take my friends laptop from 2002 and find a solution to his wireless card not being able to connect to WAP connections.

 

[Hefemeister]

Re: Major Issues involving WEP and WAP

I would go for option 2. Living in a dorm there will be a lot of users around and WEP is pretty easy to crack.

Tell your buddy to get a new card or hard wire to the router.

 

[oldskool]

Re: Major Issues involving WEP and WAP

WPA and WEP are two different things.

The first is the Wi-Fi Protected Access, and the latter is Wired Equivalent Privacy. One is how data is transferred via wireless technology, the other is how data is encrypted while travelling wirelessly. Maybe your friend needs a new card.

EDIT: Oh, I see its a laptop.

 

[Hefemeister]

I was taking a guess that he meant WPA.

 

[oldskool]

Ok I see, Hefe. That makes sense.

 

[kmote]

I couldn't add my old toshiba tecra to my WPA secured network for this exact reason. If the laptop is that old then the wireless is no doubt a PCMCIA card. Replace this with something more modern and you should be good to go.

 

[gt19dohc]

I've seen this issue many times lately. The problem is that WEP is less secure than WPA or WPA2. The older network cards will not recognize WPA because it's too advanced and the nic is not programmed to recognize the high security scheme. The pc that will not recognize WEP probably has some update on it where the system will not allow it to operate on WEP because it's not secure enough. In some cases, you may need to download some updates to the OS for it to recognize WPA. If that does not work, the only way around it is to buy a newer Wireless Network Card. I hope this helps