Topic: Help me Bonk: I'm going Bonkers!!!

[Clark Kent]

Actually, this is for anyone who knows their wireless networking well.  CK has a friendthis friend has a linksys wireless router which is used for her house to link several computers to the internet.  Visiting yesterday, I realized their wireless was unsecured, as my iBook automatically connected to the internet there.  Now, we managed to hide the network from most passer byes, and to setup an WPA password system.  Only problem was that while a thinkpad worked well on the network, their dell latitude would not do WPA.

So we switched to WEP, but the roles were switched- the latitude now easily entered on to the network, but the thinkpad would no long work on the network, or at best, we could get a limited connection.  Now, somewhere along the line, the thinkpad magically got a strong connection, but still could not access the internet.

 At thsi point, we are stuck.  The latitude will not do WPA, the thinkpad doesn't want to do WEP.  I could really use some help figureing this out.  This is where the owner was this morning:


Thanks again for all your help last night.  I really
appreciate what you and Lui tried to do.  I am sure we
can lick the problem.  At least temporarily, I can
hard wire it to the router.  Hope you had a good
morning sleep.

The Linksys router model # is Wireles G 2.4 Ghz.  I
don't know what other info you need so I will print
screen the pages just in case in the attached Word
file.  You will have to go into print preview to see
the screen copies.  Thanks for your help.

Now, if deisred, I can provide these screen shots from the web-based linksys admin utility.
Please help. 
 

[Bonk]

Don't think I can be of much help here.

I'm a firm believer in hard wired networks, I have never used a wireless one. In fact, I still think coaxial networks are superior to unshielded twisted-pair, unfortunately lazy installers and dozy users have resulted in coaxial networks being left behind for the easier to manage star topology of utp. Myself, I'd like to see coaxial fast ethernet hardware, but alas, it will never happen. 

Doesn't the wireless setup support encryption of all data?

One idea might be to limit the number of DHCP clients the router will allow. (make it equal to the number of PCs in the house..)

[Clark Kent]

Don't think I can be of much help here.

I'm a firm believer in hard wired networks, I have never used a wireless one. In fact, I still think coaxial networks are superior to unshielded twisted-pair, unfortunately lazy installers and dozy users have resulted in coaxial networks being left behind for the easier to manage star topology of utp. Myself, I'd like to see coaxial fast ethernet hardware, but alas, it will never happen. 

Doesn't the wireless setup support encryption of all data?

One idea might be to limit the number of DHCP clients the router will allow. (make it equal to the number of PCs in the house..)

Yeah, wireless networks are mostly for convenience.  That saud, we have to get this wireless setup working.
We've limited the number to one or two more than the computers in the house.  Should we limit it to the exact number?  What do we do if it's supposed to always be that number, but not all of the computers are on?

[Just plain old Punisher]

You can use MAC address filtering as a security precaution. Enter in the MAC address of each client in the accepted clients list of the wireless router setup.

What WEP setting are you using? Have you tried 64bit automatic? Generate a hex key using a passphrase (A phonenumber with area code works well)

[Lepton]

You may need to do an update to the Latitude laptop for it to use WPA.  You may need to do some sort of driver update for the wireless card as well as an update to the operating system.  It's been a while since I heard anything about WPA, but at the time it seemed that driver, firmware, and OS updates seemed to be required.

[Bonk]

You can use MAC address filtering as a security precaution. Enter in the MAC address of each client in the accepted clients list of the wireless router setup.

This is an excellent idea and will certainly block the casual bandwidth leech.