Is it me or does wep suck?

[ivwshane]

I don't know if it's me or something I did but I'm starting to really hate wireless, especially wep.

It seems like any device I get and setup with a wep key works fine but as soon as I go and change wep key I can no longer get an ip from the AP.

I've tried a linksys, a ms router, and a d link AP, all were working great untill I made a few changes. Now when clients connects they cannot obtain an IP address.

As soon as I disable wep it works, if I change the security to wpa it works.

What the hell is the issue!!
I've called linksys tech support and they have nothing, I've posted a similar issue here and got nothing.

Is wireless or wep really this finicky?

 

[nweaver]

no, I think you are messing it up (to be honest).

I an a wireless test engineer, and I do wep over and over every day. The only problems I see with wep are ones caused by me mistyping.

 

[ktwebb]

Originally posted by: ivwshane
As soon as I disable wep it works, if I change the security to wpa it works.

Er.....why would you use WEP if you can use WPA? Do you have a legacy client on your WLAN that does not support WPA?

I am a little unclear on why you would change your WEP key anyway. Yes, a dynamic or everchaning WEP key is more secure but WEP can be broken so easily and quickly now then you'd have to change your key at the very minimum daily to see any benefit and really a couple of times a day. Even then if someone is setup in your AP sell space and has the tools then WEP is not much of a deterrent.

If you can use WPA on all your clients there is no reason to use WEP.

 

[ivwshane]

Yes I do have legacy clients.

And the reason for the change was because I was using my own equipment at the office to test out a setup.

And I don't see how I could miss type a wep key when it's set to something very easy that I type every day for my passwords.

 

[nweaver]

Originally posted by: ivwshane
Yes I do have legacy clients.

And the reason for the change was because I was using my own equipment at the office to test out a setup.

And I don't see how I could miss type a wep key when it's set to something very easy that I type every day for my passwords.

like I said, I type, retype, and retype again wep keys...several times a day, 5 days a week. If the only WEP issue I have found is mystyped key, then I doubt it's wep sucking. I am using high end hardware, so maybe that is the difference.