wireless G security

[brianl0202]

i have a wrt54g linksys router and one wireless desktop pc with a linksys card. i enabled 128 bit WEP. i also have the option on my router setup screen to use WPA which from what i understand is more secure. i dont think WPA can be configured on my wireless card,or at least i cant find where, just WEP. I have just the 2 pc's on the netowrk using windows xp home and a cable modem. do i need something else to use WPA? driver update for the card or something? or something else? is WEP fine for my network--only 2 PC's, not really any super sensitive data or anything. I just figure i should use WPA if it is more secure but what do I have to do to use it?

 

[jtatsud]

There are some requirements before you can use WPA. They are:

1) Since you are using Windows XP on your desktop PC, you need to download a patch in order for XP to support WPA. The patch was recently put on Microsoft's Windows Update site so if you go there, it should be obvious which patch you need.

2) Your wireless card will need to support WPA. From your note it sounds like it's an 802.11g card so it should support WPA. Just make sure you have downloaded the latest drivers for it from the Linksys web site.

3) Once you have done 1 and 2 above, you should now see WPA and WPA-PSK as choices on your wireless configuration options for your XP system.

4) Make sure you use WPA-PSK on both the router and the client side. WPA-PSK is for small peer-to-peer networks like the one you have set up. WPA is for larger networks where there is likely a Radius server handling WPA security.

Good luck! Let me know if this works.

 

[brianl0202]

thanks for your response. might be a dumb question but do i download the XP patch on my wireless PC or the one connected directly to the router?

and would WEP or WPA have anything to do with my connection? i have very good or excellent signal strength, but after 3-4 minutes i lose my connection. a bubble pops up from the netowrk icon in my task bar saying there is more then one wireless connection available and i lose my connection. i can then reconnect but its a pain because this always happens. could this be the channel i am using or something else? linkysys said try changing the channel but if anyone knows anything else let me know thanks

 

[jtatsud]

The XP patch is for your wireless PC, but it won't hurt anything to install it on both systems.

For your connection loss, it might be caused because you have 802.1x security enabled on your router or your client. Check out my response to the "Sporadic Timeouts" item on this forum. It should be on page 2 of the forum.

Let me know if this helps!

 

[brianl0202]

everything seems to be okay now. i downloaded ms update patch for WPA and enabled WPA. Now everything seems okay and I am not having anymore connection problems. I would have thought it would have been okay with WEP too but for whatever reason I was having problems. Also, with WPA, the 802.1x box is grayed out so I couldn't change it but it looks like it doesn't matter in this case.

 

[jtatsud]

Glad you got everything to work! Some wireless routers (appropriately) prevent you from implementing 802.1x security if you are using WPA-PSK - others don't.