Hello, I just bought a dlink wireless router. I configured it for wpa psk. On my laptop, I couldn't pick up an IP address (the router was set for dhcp). It just stopped at "acquiring network address". I configured it for wep, and I can connect no problem. I know wep is an older technology. Will configuring it for wep hinder the speed, or, more importantly for me, the range of my wireless network. Or is wpa/wep just related to encryption and won't make a difference.
Thanks
Almost certainly you have the WPA key wrong. Its easy to mistype these keys and most clients hide the text with asterisks so you don't notice the typo.
The difference is that WEP can be cracked in a matter of minutes, possibly even faster.
Thanks for the reply. Does performance suffer as well? ie speed and/ or range TIA
Not that you'd notice. And ... wireless connection manager matters too, IME. Though you tell us nothing about OS or connection manager.
IME, MS's "Wireless Zero Configuration" manager is enormously more reliable/robust than those provided by some h/w vendors.
Some things are a wee bit more involved than light-bulbs. :')
J
If anything, WEP would probably be slightly quicker because its a simpler algo.
However if you really need to worry about the impact of encryption on bandwidth, wireless is the wrong choice for you. With wireless G you could get anything from 0.5Mb to 25Mb depending on walls, distance, weather, people standing in the wrong place, lights being on or off, etc etc etc.
Japhy hath wroth:
Obviously, all Dlink routers are identical. If you can figure out how to identify what you just purchased, you might also try checking if it has the latest firmware installed.
Good.
That usually means you goofed on typing the WPA-PSK key. MS decided that you didn't need connection progress indication for wireless. So, you can't really tell what failed. If your sure you have the WPA-PSK key typed correctly, then the other possibility is that you have a MAC or IP address filter enabled in your unspecified model DLink wireless router. If this unit was one returned by some previous customer, it could easily have setting left from their mis-adventure. If so, punch the reset button and start over.
WEP is easily cracked and offers little security. Go back to WPA-PSK and try again.
It really depends on the router. Underpowered old routers don't like the encryption overhead and will slow down somewhat. My guess is about 10-15% for either WEP or WPA on older units. In many cases, it's also affected by the speed of the client computah, especially if the WPA encryption is done in driver. Fortunately, this hasn't been the case for many years. These daze, there's hardly any slowdown of either technology.
However, there's a huge difference in security between WEP and WPA. WPA was invented because WEP security absolutly sucks. Go back to WPA-PSK and figure out what went wrong. If you can't type, use cut-n-past to insert the pass phrase.
Speaking of security, Jeff, is it possible to match the security in cabled LAN? Or just a pipe dream?
What about if you use Linux?
Just learning, ya know........
Security for you or for the cable company (ISP)? I don't think you've seen how bad cable modem security was when it was first implimented. Cable modems use DHCP to deliver more than just IP addresses. It delivers rate caps, encryption keys, and other goodies. The initial implimentation allowed for a user to setup their own DHCP server, and feed the cable modem whatever values seemed interesting. That giant hole was eventually plugged and it's now quite secure. It is possible to butcher a cable modem to sniff traffic on your network segment (usually about 2000 IP addresses), but the DOCSIS BPI+ (Baseline Privacy Plus) is quite secure from casual hacking.
In general WPA-PSK is not quite as secure as BPI+ because of the shared key problem. A shared key can be stolen, copied, or extracted from user accessible machines (client computahs). For example:
BPI+ uses a much better key exchange mechanisms and is therefore better. However, if you use WPA-RADIUS, which requires a RADIUS server, there is no shared key to steal, copy, or extract. So, if you want security as good as cable, then get a RADIUS server (or 802.1x service) and use WPA-RADIUS.
Incidentally, BPI+ only uses RSA DES 40/56 bit encryption, which is good enough for the purpose as long as the key exchange mechanism is secure. This should underscore the not so well understood concept that longer encryption keys don't necessarily mean better security if the IV (initialization vector) mechanism is flawed, and the key exchange mechanism is faulty.
Use Linux for what? DD-WRT is Linux. Both Buffalo and Linksys firmware is based on Linux, which is why we have open source code to play with and improve. Linux is not some magic bullet that solves all problems.
My method is Learn By Destroying. If you haven't broken something, and then repaired it, you don't understand it.
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