I just moved into a new apartment and I'm having quite a bit of
difficulty connecting to my new roommates' existing wireless network.
I purchased a Linksys USB adapter because the router they currently
have is a Linksys brand (not sure of the model). The installation
instructions said that XP would complain when I tried to install it,
and to only have the cd install the drivers and not any software. So
it seems that I have to use the Windows software to manage the device
- none of the installation software will work with XP. If I try to
explicitly run the setup for the Linksys configuration program, it
just flashes up on the screen for a fraction of a second and then
closes immediately, without installing anything. I can install the
Linksys monitor program, but this will only let me see that yes, there
are networks around and I can see the router on my network, but it
doesn't let me input any values. Once the drivers were installed on my
XP machine, I was able to see other networks in the neighborhood using
the Wireless Zero Connection and even momentarily connect to one or
two of them with no issues. But when trying to connect to the
household network I encountered some issues:
1. they currently have WEP enabled. the ascii key they are using is a
16 character one, but WZC only allows me to enter 40bits (5) or 104
bits (13 characters). doing some research online, it seems that the
final three characters (24 bits) are just for some sort of overhead
and I should be able to just enter the first 13. I am able to enter
this as the WEP key and get no messages saying incorrect key, but I
also tried putting in 13 characters of garbage and it still seemed to
be accepted with no problems. Should I expect some kind of "Incorrect
key" message?
2. When I was able to connect to other neighborhood networks (not able
to do that anymore it seems) they would automatically assign me an IP,
Gateway, DNS, etc. When I connect to my apt's, however, I only receive
an IP and a subnet. The IP seems a bit odd as well (not matching
192.168.x.x at least). I checked my other roommate's settings, and the
IP/Gateway/DNS numbers he has don't match the IP I received at all. I
tried putting in all those numbers manually, but it doesn't seem to
have any effect (ie, still having issues with problem #3, below).
3. WZC lets me connect to the household network (SSID is enabled and I
can always see it on the list of available networks). The signal
strength and link are always excellent, and it shows me transmitting
packets at a rate of 11 Mbps (turns out I don't have USB 2.0 so I'm
not going to get any higher than that right now). But throughout all
of this, I have received exactly ZERO packets.
I've never used wireless before, but I'm not sure if this is a
wireless issue or just a general XP networking configuration problem.
I've tried to put as many useful details in here as I can remember,
but if there are any other settings or numbers that would help in
diagnosing this problem please let me know and I will try and post
them.
Thanks in advance for any and all help in resolving this...
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