wep still does not work

[Tommy Trussell]

On 4/4/06, Matthew Kuiken <matt.kuiken at verizon.net> wrote:
> sebastien wrote:
> > My router does not give an ip when I input my key. when I leave my
> > wireless network open (unencrypted), that works perfectly.
> >
> > As Im under breezy, Ive tried the brand new dapper live cd, knoppix
> > 3.8... unsuccessfully whatever i input (passphrase, wepkey, hex)
> >
> > wep encryption worked perfectly with win$ (which is dead on my pc )
...
> Back when I was using Breezy, I found that I could not get the WEP key
> to work unless I set it to Hex input, and made sure all of the alpha
> values were in upper case. I don't know why it didn't allow lower case,
> but it wouldn't work for me.
>
> I read somewhere that using the string entry in Breezy would only
> generate 64-bit keys, so if you're using 128-bit keys, the string
> doesn't work. This is purely memory, though, so I may be quoting an
> invalid source.
>
>
> I also had problems using the network-configure dialog at first, but
> just before I changed to Dapper, I know i used it successfully at least
> once.

I used WEP quite effectively in Breezy on a PPC system, BUT under some
unknown circumstances the networking dialog would truncate the WEP
string. I ended up editing the hex string directly in
/etc/network/interfaces and it worked well.

As Matthew Kuiken wrote, you will need to enter the WEP key in
hexadecimal, because unfortunately different vendors have different
ways of "transposing" from text to hex. (I originally wrote "ASCII" in
that sentence and realized the problem might be some vendors assume US
ASCII characters and others might assume UTF encoding of one flavor or
another.)

I can't wait for WPA to be more cleanly supported because in my
experience so far, not only is WPA reputed to be much more secure than
WEP, but the "human readable" text keys seem to be interoperable
across different brands of equipment. (I've networked successfully
among a LinkSys WRT54GS running stock firmware and DD-WRT, a LinkSys
WAP54G, an Apple Airport Express, and a Mac iBook.)