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General discussion

Wireless Network with WEP protection

May 19, 2005 7:20AM PDT

I am trying to connect to of my Home PC's. My internet connecting comes in Downstairs and connects to a Netgear 108mps Wireless Firewall router WGT 624. The Pc downstairs is running XP Pro SP2 AMD 2100+ 764 RAM 1.7ghz. I am trying to get it connected to my PC upstairs in my Office wirelessly and its running XP Home. I would perfer it to have WEP protection. I get the network set up at my PC downstairs and when i try to connect to it i get little to no connectivity?? i can not find out why this is? is there something eles i have to do to the router other than change it from No security to WEP proctection?

Thanks Alot for the Help!

John Arkema

Discussion is locked

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Unless...
May 19, 2005 7:50AM PDT

Unless new router FIRMWARE and drivers fix it, you have 2 choices.

1. Fall back to MAC FILTERING. It's pretty tight security.

2. Return the client adapter and pick up a model by the same maker of the wifi router.

Bob

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Confused...
May 20, 2005 12:35AM PDT

I'm confused by your request. You say you want to connect the PCs. Connect specifically to what?

If the upstairs PC can connect to the internet (wirelessly through the Netgear router downstairs which is connected to your cable modem or whatever...), then you have connectivity. If the upstairs computer doesn't connect to the internet, then you need to start working on that. First, set all security OFF in the wireless router to simplify things. XP will give you a warning message that you are about to connect to an unsecured location, but go with it for now. If you can connect, then start locking down the security one step at a time. Change the SSID, set your WEP password, and MAC filtering, in that order (though as Bob points out you can use MAC filtering alone if the WEP stuff becomes troublesome). Be sure your connection works at each stage of the changes so you know exactly what item you have to work on if it doesn't work right away. If you get no connectivity at all (i.e., the XP wireless network connection dialog can't find the Netgear to connect to it), then you are going to have to figure out why - could be a physical issue with the layout of your house (too far or lots of walls in between) or a hardware issue (as Bob points out, firmware usually needs to be updated even on brand new devices or incompatible devices - despite the apparent ''standards'', some brands don't play well with others).

Once you have connectivity to the internet, then you can work on connectivity between the upstairs and downstairs machines if you want that. First, you will need to manage the firewall settings - with the security emphasis in Service Pack 2, the firewalls are activated by default. That means nobody gets in, including your internal upstairs-to-downstairs connection attempts. Second, you'll need to set sharing parameters for the particular folders on each machine that are to be shared.

dw

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Recent experience
May 22, 2005 4:38AM PDT

I recently struggled to set up a wireless system too. Make sure your router settings are the same as your computer's WiFi settings. With my Linksys model, I did this on the internet. In WAP (I believe) they provide you with a "key" to enter into all your computers.

Remember encryption and access are not the same. You can encrypt information, but this won't keep people from accessing your system.

I agree with the post of trying to see if things work with no secuirty ("Shared"), and then adjusting things as you go, though this will take some time.