WindowsXP Home 128b WEP/WAP connection

[Kevin Luster]

I've got 2 WindowsXP Home PC's with wireless clients. One
of them is able to connect to my primary WAP but the
other is not.

My poking around is making me wonder if the second PC
does not have support for the 128b encryption which I
have enabled in my primary WAP. The indicators I have for
this are that when I enter the full 26 key WEP key in
the 'Network key:' field of the wireless properties
dialog it gets reset back to 8 characters (represented as
circles) when I look at it later. The other indication I
have is that I've been able to connect to my secondary
WAP which does not have any encryption enabled from the
second PC so I know that the wireless hardware is working.

Between the first and second PC's I noticed that the
first PC has 'Key format:' and 'Key length:' fields in
the Wireless Network Properties dialog which I can set to
Hexadecimal and 104 bits, but second PC only has 'Network
key:' and 'Confirm network key:' entries. I'm wondering
if there's some patch or upgrade I can apply which will
let me have the other dialog box type so I can confirm if
it will let me enter a 104b key.

Any help here would be appreciated. I've updated the
second PC with the Service Pack 1 and all of the Windows
Update patches which were posted as of today. I would
consider upgrading to WindowsXP Pro but since my other PC
is running WindowsXP Home already there's got to be some
way to get this working.

 

[Kevin Luster]

I decided to return my USB wireless client and get
another (ended up with the Microsoft one) and things are
working now. I'm still curious about why the wireless
network dialog boxes are different, but it looks like my
primary problem was some sort of compatibility issue
between my client and my WAP.

 

[Barb Bowman [MVP-Windows]]

The key length determine the encryption strength. MS wanted to simplify it
and "just make it work" I guess in SP1


1 ASCII Character=8 Bits

1 HEX Character=4 Bits


40 or 64 bit ASCII WEP code has 5 characters

40 or 64 bit HEX WEP code has 10 characters


104 or 128 bit ASCII WEP code has 13 characters

104 or 128 bit HEX WEP code has 26 characters

Additionally, you need to UNmark 802.1x authentication and you really should
change the SSID on the access point from default to something else.

 

[NoK]

Barb,

Just keying in 26 hex characters did not work for me. I
entered my full 104-bit WEP hex key (26 ASCII [0-9a-f]
characters). I verified that the zero configuration tool
was only giving me 40-bit WEP when I changed by WAP to 40-
bit WEP with the first 10 characters. My card then
connected fine. But I want 104-bit, not 40-bit, WEP.

I have had the "Enable 802.1x authentication" checked and
unchecked, with the same effect. It was a poor choice for
the screenshot - I was mainly trying to show that there
was no 128-bit key length field. Why do other window
shots (e.g. step 3 at
http://support.dlink.com/faq/view.asp?
prod_id=1065&question=dwl%2D520+WEP) show a key-length
field? Is there some XP update beyond SP1 that I somehow
missed that gets me the key length field? Maybe something
that will be coming out in the near future?

And, yes - I changed my SSID from something else
to "default" for the purposes of publishing the
screenshot on the web. Fortunately, I have yet to see
another wireless network. I will change it back when I
get this worked out.

Thanks,
NoK