WEP problems Proxim AP with D-Link card

[Sukumar]

I have a D-Link DWL-650 card and recently tried using it with a Proxim AP. The AP had WEP 64 bit turned on with an ASCII pass phrase (instead of hex code).

I was unable to connect to the AP, however a colleague with an Orinoco card was able to.

Could someone shed light on why this problem occurred ? Is it the ASCII pass phrase and its conversion into a key that is creating this problem ? I have read that different vendors use different encryption algorithms.

Your assistance/inputs much appreciated.

[jatkins679]

Work from the bottom up the TCP/IP stack.

When you say you were unable to 'connect' to the AP at all, do you mean that your client didn't register any signal from the AP or that you were simply unable to become a node of your network via your wireless? If you're getting a reasonably strong signal on your wireless client, then that's probably not the problem and configuration is.

If so, turn off WEP very briefly on your network (if you can) and make your configuration settings as simple as possible and then see what happens. If it works, then you know that your encryption configuration is what's screwing you up.

You also might want to see what setting up a temporary ad-hoc network with your colleague's client machine does (no encryption if that's an option, keep it simple). If you cannot do that but see a signal from his machine, then again it's probably a configuration problem with your machine.

[dstern]

Hello

Have you tried to type in the WEP key in hex on the Orinoco AP in the form of 0xAABBCCDDEE for a 64 bit key?

David

[Sukumar]

Thanks for your replies.

The hexadecimal WEP key seems to work between the Proxim AP and D-Link card.

The problem seems to be with using an ASCII WEP phrase. Could it be that D-Link and Proxim use different algorithms to encode a pass phrase ?

Thanks.

[dstern]

Hello

They should both internally convert the ASCII character to it's corresponding hexadecimal value. Keep in mind though that the ASCII key is case sensitive. The main backdraw with ASCII keys is imho that you limit the key space, since you can't type in non-printable characters.

David