I bought an AirPort Extreme wireless unit for my Mac a couple of years ago. I didn’t use it though, since I was on a dial-up and it kept wanting to dial in even when I turned off the connection. At my apartment I had cable, but I couldn’t connect wirelessly for some reason.
Now I’m back at the house, and we got cable and cable Internet today. My roommate connected via a DSL cord. When I tried, I couldn’t connect. We hooked up the AirPort. After a little fiddling with the controls I was able to connect, and I’m wireless right now. But roomie’s PC laptop can’t connect. It detects the AirPort and says it’s connected. But it also says it’s not connected. I’ve reset the password, rebooted the AirPort, and rebooted the modem to no avail. He says he needs a ‘network key’. Is that different from the password? Is it something I can find as the ‘administrator’?
Basically the question is this: How do I set up the AirPort such that both of us can connect to the modem via it and be online?
Open up the Airport Admin Utility program (should be in your Utilities folder). Select your base station in the list, and click “configure”. In the window that opens, click on the “Password” button at the top. A new window will open, saying, “To connect to the AirPort network created by this base station from a computer not using AirPort software, you should use the following:”, and the longer, hex password after that is what your friend needs to enter. That should do it.
Okay, I did that. It said ‘WPA Password: [the password I set up]’. There were no hex characters after that. Interestingly, I’d used mixed-case when I set up the password but the WPA Password is all lowercase. Since I told roomie to use uppercase in certain places, maybe that caused a problem.
He went up to Canada today, and took his laptop with him. I’ll have to have him try using all lowercase when he gets back tonight. (As well as trying other things as they are suggested here!)
As far as I know, WPA is case-sensitive. WEP is not. That was probably what caused the problem. WEP is not as user-friendly or as good for cross-platform compatibility as WPA. They learned from problems with the earlier standard to create the new one. You’d want to use WPA for both security and compatibility reasons.
WEP is no longer considered secure at all. It’s marginally better than having an open network, but can be easily circumvented by anyone who knows what they’re doing. It’s kind of like doorknob locks; keeps casual passers-by from opening your door, but can easily be shimmed by any schmuck with a plastic card.
(Occasionally, there are some problems with interoperation in WEP, but it’s usually on the side of Macs connecting to Windows or mixed networks. The reason being that Apple uses a different hash for generating passwords from passphrases than Windows standard. In this case, you want to use hex and put a $ sign before the hex to let the Mac or the Airport unit know that you want to use straight hex, not a generated passphrase. It’s a pain to generate a hex, so there are some utilities out there to help. Avoid the whole issue by going with WPA instead.)