Getting WEP to work.

[diamond]

I have a 3COM 3CRSHPW wireless
card on my laptop, and I just purchased
a Linksys WAP11v26 access point to
hook to my home network.

Obviously, I want to turn WEP on on
this thing, and the WAP and my card
both support 128-bit keys, so that's
what I intend to use.

Unfortunately, I can't get it to work.
With WEP off, the laptop sees the
network just fine, and everything
works smoothly. However, when I
enable WEP and put in the right key,
I am able to connect to the network,
but I can't get packets anywhere.
I can't even ping or log into the WAP
itself.

I assume my problem has something
to do with the WEP keys. I tried both
typing in the ASCII passphrase
(watching for case sensitivity), and
when that didn't work, I wrote down
the Hex keys themselves from the
AP and manually typed them into my
card's configuration. No go.

I did notice something odd; when I
typed in the passphrase in my
card's configuration utility (again,
keeping case the same) it generated
a *different* hex key than the WAP
showed for the exact same phrase.
I don't know what that means, but
as I said, it still didn't work even when
I directly copied the Hex code itself.

Any ideas?

[Pandora]

Hi,
Be very careful entering the hex key, be sure to double and triple check. Then verify that the two are in agreement as to the type of connection (open system for example is selected on both), you should verify the properties of your wireless client card after enabling wep to assure all features are set correctly to match your access point. Good luck!

[Phoenix]

The ASCII passphrase method won't work if the two devices are a different brand (i.e 3Com and Linksys), so you can give up on trying this method.

The hex entry should work, but there is one catch. Wi-Fi certification does not check compatibility of 128-bit WEP implementations from different chipset vendors. I believe your 3Com card has an Intersil chipset inside and the Linksys an Atmel chipset (i.e. garbage). There have been lots of problems with Atmel chipsets in the past (poor range, poor throughput, etc.). It wouldn't surprise me in the least if this was another example of that. And another example of Linksys' policy of buying the cheapest chipset they can find rather than one that works...