WEP-PSK

AdamEW · 1 Jan 2007 at 17:42

Hi there I have a netgear DG834G v2 and Im having some trouble securing our wireless network..

so I set it (as someone advised me to) to have WEP-PSK protection and gave it a password of letters and numbers, but it doesnt seem to work.

When my dad tries to connect to the network it says the key has to be 5 or 10 ascii characters.. so I thought Ill just set the password to 10 letters and numbers.. but my dads pc although when I enter the new password attempts to connect instead of whining at me it fails to connect. I really dunno what im doing here so any help would be much appreciated.

tolien · 1 Jan 2007 at 18:02

Sounds like you've comfused WEP and WPA-PSK somewhere along the line.

5 or 10 ASCII characters sounds like generating a WEP key - a WPA PSK can be up to 42.

AdamEW · 1 Jan 2007 at 18:03

hmm, I see, I deffinitely set it as WEP-PSK in my router options so I presume it must be my dads laptop getting confused. Could it be that his laptop doesnt support WEP-PSK?

tolien · 1 Jan 2007 at 20:16

WEP-PSK doesn't exist (per se).

If it's set to WEP on the router, then it'll be the hex that the client machine's looking for, ie the string of digits that the router generated when you entered the password.

chimaera · 2 Jan 2007 at 11:55

WPA-PSK uses a password whilst WEP uses a hex key generated from a password, sounds like you've got the 2 mixed up between the router and laptop.

Have another look and make sure the router is set to WPA-PSK with a password, then type the same password into the laptop on connection.

Echo'ing tolien really

just not as coherently.

I made the same mistake when i first set mine up, i set the router to WEP and typed in the password, but that in turn generated a hex key that is meant to be used by the laptop, i used the password that generated the hex key so it wouldn't match and didn't connect.