Linksys BEFW11S4 has defeated my Mac knowledge, help!

[Kay]

Archived from groups: alt.internet.wireless (More info?)

Hello,
I have a Linksys BEFW11S4 that works well on my three PC's, but when
we try and opperate the Mac wirelessly, we get a signal, but no
ability to connect to the router. I called Linksys, and they said
they could not help me with any Mac problems.
The Mac is running OS X 10.2.8, and I don't know enough about Mac's to
give any more info, but any help would be appreciated. Right now we
are switching a cable between the desktop and the Mac laptop, but both
users need to write papers...and they're getting cranky!

Thank you!

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.internet.wireless (More info?)

On 16 Oct 2004 17:55:34 -0700, kincalifornia@yahoo.com (kay) wrote:

>I have a Linksys BEFW11S4 that works well on my three PC's, but when
>we try and opperate the Mac wirelessly, we get a signal, but no
>ability to connect to the router. I called Linksys, and they said
>they could not help me with any Mac problems.

For good reason. You don't have a Linksys card in your unspecified
Mac mutation. Any reason to keep the model number of the computah or
card a secret? I'll assume you have an Airport or Airport Extreme
card.

>The Mac is running OS X 10.2.8, and I don't know enough about Mac's to
>give any more info, but any help would be appreciated.

Yeah, right. You can't read the label?

>Right now we
>are switching a cable between the desktop and the Mac laptop, but both
>users need to write papers...and they're getting cranky!

Ok. Cranky users are certainly a serious crisis.

The usual Mac specific problem is that Apple wants you to specify the
type of WEP key (also known as password) with a suitable prefix. If
it's in Hexadecimal, you preceed it with either a "0x" or a "$"
depending on driver version. Try both. One should work.

http://homepage.mac.com/bner/iblog/B1570693677/C1389640084/E1922640364/
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030903055329483
http://www.osxhax.com/archives/000049.html


--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@comix.santa-cruz.ca.us
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 AE6KS 831-336-2558

 

[David]

Archived from groups: alt.internet.wireless (More info?)

On 2004-10-16 20:55:34 -0400, kincalifornia@yahoo.com (kay) said:

> Hello,
> I have a Linksys BEFW11S4 that works well on my three PC's, but when
> we try and opperate the Mac wirelessly, we get a signal, but no
> ability to connect to the router. I called Linksys, and they said
> they could not help me with any Mac problems.
> The Mac is running OS X 10.2.8,


I've hooked Macs running both 10.2.8 and 10.3.5 to a BEFW11S4 with no
problems. The wireless network uses MAC address filtering, WEP, and
SSID broadcast turned off. Go to Internet Connect and select the
Airport connection. Network name is the SSID you set in the Linksys
router. If the router is set to use 128 bit WEP choose the in the
network type. (Don't have a10.2.8 box here to remember exact wording.)
Make sure choose the HEX option, not the text option. Enter the HEX
code as shown in the Linksys router. You can't use the password option.
Since 10.2.8 you do not need to prefix the HEX code with $. As long as
you enter all the figures correctly is should work. If you have MAC
filtering enabled on the router, be sure to enter the MAC address of
the airport card in the router config.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.internet.wireless (More info?)

In article <5bac721b.0410161655.1b348207@posting.google.com>,
kay <kincalifornia@yahoo.com> wrote:
:I have a Linksys BEFW11S4 that works well on my three PC's, but when
:we try and opperate the Mac wirelessly, we get a signal, but no
:ability to connect to the router.

I had no difficulties in getting a BEFS11S4 version 2 to work wirelessly
with a Mac G4 under OS X 10.2 or OS X 10.3.

Which wireless card is being used on the Mac, and which driver is
being used? When I inserted a Linksys 802.11b card into the
cardbus slot in the G4 [which is intended only for an Apple Airbase
card that has no internal antenna], the Linksys card was detected
as if it was an Apple card. {I posted about this in a Mac newsgroup
and the people there said they were suprised the card didn't fry,
but it worked fine for me.}

As the Linksys card's antenna sticks out of the cardbus slot,
preventing me from closing the G4 case, I put it into a Linksys
PCI adapter. Linksys does not have an OSX driver for the Linksys
card in the Linksys PCI adapter, but I was able to find some
nagware drivers on the net that allowed it to work without
difficulty. The same drivers worked for a D-Link card in the
D-Link PCI adapter. It is fairly easy to tell if you do not have
an appropriate driver: if you don't, then the wireless card
will not appear in the System Preferences GUI.

What I ended up doing, rather than buy the nagware, was to attach
the G4 directly (through wired ethernet) to the BEFS11S4, and to
use a Linksys WET11 wireless 802.11b bridge where the BEFW11S4 would
otherwise have been placed. (Later though, I just used a longish
ethernet cable directly to the firewall, and moved the BEFS11S4 to
the basement where it was needed for another connection.)
--
Caution: A subset of the statements in this message may be
tautologically true.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.internet.wireless (More info?)

In article <1pk3n09df2csbjn6nnqo5d0eu8noppq8vs@4ax.com>,
Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@comix.santa-cruz.ca.us> wrote:
:The usual Mac specific problem is that Apple wants you to specify the
:type of WEP key (also known as password) with a suitable prefix. If
:it's in Hexadecimal, you preceed it with either a "0x" or a "$"
:depending on driver version. Try both. One should work.

I don't know about OSX 10.2.8 that the OP was running, but in
10.3 at least, the GUI will count the number of characters provided and
make assumptions about the numeric base of the passphrase if the
passphrase matches the typical magic lengths. Or to put it another
way, if it is the right size to be a complete hex string, it assumes
it is a hex string, and if it the right size to be a maximal ascii
passphrase, then it assumes that it is an ascii passphrase.
Saves having to put in the 0x or $ if you are working in hex.
--
Feep if you love VT-52's.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.internet.wireless (More info?)

On 17 Oct 2004 07:05:02 GMT, roberson@ibd.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca (Walter
Roberson) wrote:

>In article <1pk3n09df2csbjn6nnqo5d0eu8noppq8vs@4ax.com>,
>Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@comix.santa-cruz.ca.us> wrote:
>:The usual Mac specific problem is that Apple wants you to specify the
>:type of WEP key (also known as password) with a suitable prefix. If
>:it's in Hexadecimal, you preceed it with either a "0x" or a "$"
>:depending on driver version. Try both. One should work.
>
>I don't know about OSX 10.2.8 that the OP was running, but in
>10.3 at least, the GUI will count the number of characters provided and
>make assumptions about the numeric base of the passphrase if the
>passphrase matches the typical magic lengths. Or to put it another
>way, if it is the right size to be a complete hex string, it assumes
>it is a hex string, and if it the right size to be a maximal ascii
>passphrase, then it assumes that it is an ascii passphrase.
>Saves having to put in the 0x or $ if you are working in hex.

Time for a rant on Apple Wireless. I just finished setting up an
Airport Extreme and a new iBook G4 for a customer. She was busy
answering all the questions during the iBook startup so I just used
the Windoze Airport setup utility (4.0.2) on my PC to get the Airport
Extreme running. It was a bit non-typical as there was an existing
router. I therefore had to setup the Airport as a wireless bridge and
disable the DHCP server. I had a wonderful diversion figuring out the
apparently random selection of the IP address range as it would go
through all the RFC-1918 IP blocks until it found one it liked. With
the DHCP server off, the MAC address sniffer in the setup utility
would not find the Airport unless the PC's IP address was already set
to an IP address within its range. I had to constantly change the
laptops IP address to follow the changes and was eventually able to
nail down the Airport to a static IP address in the routers IP block.

Switching to the iBook G4 10.3.1. Initial setup was using no
encryption and working quite nicely. However, when I enabled
encryption on the Airport, it didn't bother asking 64/128bit WEP (no
WPA) key length as you mentioned. I just picked something stupid (I
was in a hurry) and it worked. No complaints about key length or
padding to 5/13 characters. Everything worked just fine. We soon ran
into some PC file sharing oddities in 10.3.1 so we immediately
upgraded to 10.3.2. Fixed and working. I thought I was done. Wrong.

When I went to setup WEP on a Dell Inspiron 5150 laptop, I ran into a
problem. The WEP key wouldn't work. 30 mins later, I found that WEP
was in 64 bit WEP mode. Makes sense since the Airport didn't bother
asking if I wanted 64 or 128 bit encryption. What it did was
"automatically" decide that since my stupid WEP key was between 5 and
13 characters, I must obviously want 64 bit encryption. It may have
truncated my selection of WEP key to 5 characters. The client
software apparently does the same thing. The PC wasn't smart enough
to do that. So, I reset the ASCII WEP key to exactly 13 characters,
and everything worked normally from there as 128 bit WEP.

I don't have anything against such automatic setups and assumptions on
the part of Apple (and other manufactories). What bugs me is that
they don't bother announcing their assumptions or documenting their
behavior. I also have some nasty things to say about the creative
terminology, metaphors, and buzzwords used by Apple, their inability
to distinguish between WAN and LAN side configuration in the Airport
Extreme, and their over automation of the install. None of the
aformentioned is fatal, but it does bug me.


--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@comix.santa-cruz.ca.us
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 AE6KS 831-336-2558