Hi,

My roommates have macs and we are running a cable modem into an apple airport extreme base station. There was a concern that we were loosing bandwidth to some moochers, so in addition to turning down the power so that it didn't extend that far and adding an essid (which the guy running things can't seem to enter except wirelessly (can't seem to do with ethernet cable)), and screening for hardware addresses, he wants to run wep. I have an orinoco classic gold PC card and am running fedora core 2. I see the entry in GUI configuration for the key, and enter it. He chose an ascii alphanumeric phrase, and I didn't get any complaints when entering it. It is listed in the configuration files as s:'whateverkey', but I can't seem to connect. It seems that the key shouldn't have to be a hex value, but I have read that not all base stations convert from ascii to hex in the same way. I wonder if he even knows how to specify to the base station, if he did choose a hex value, that it is a hex value and not some ascii string to be converted. Thoughts?

Thanks for your input.

Oh, he enabled 128-bit encryption, which my card can handle. I converted his phrase into hex by hand, and it comes out to 18 hex characters. As 128 can handle up to 26 characters, it doesn't seem too long. (I did get notified by the GUI interface when attempting to use an earlier suggestion which was too long).

The link below details how to fix this problem....

http://wifinetnews.com/archives/001264.html