Which password?

August 20, 2008 8:16 PM

Cannot connect to my friend's wireless Apple network. What gives?

I'm using a Lenovo Thinkpad (I've removed Thinkpad Access connections and only connect now through Windows Wireless Network Connection). I'm staying with my friend in New York who has an Airport Extreme wireless connection. I'm sitting next to him and I see him enter the WEP key (an 8 key series of letters) into his Apple laptop and he connects with ease.

I, on the other hand, enter that key and I get the following error message:

"The network password needs to be 40bits or 104bits depending on your network configuration. This can be entered as 5 or 13
ascii characters or 10 or 26 hexadecimal characters."

What gives? He says that other friends have been able to access the network no problem.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

posted by mammary16 to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

What the friend is probably putting in is the WEP Passphrase (which can be any length), and there's also the WEP Key (which your friend can find by logging onto the router). The WEP Key fits the profile of 10 or 26 hex characters.
posted by deezil at 8:42 PM on August 20, 2008

Whoops, also of note, if the router doesn't have any generated keys, there often times is a button close to generatethe WEP keys from the passphrase given.
posted by deezil at 8:43 PM on August 20, 2008

Best answer: your friend needs to go into his AIRPORT ADMIN UTILITY. when in there, he needs to select his apple base station which will open a new window with a number of tabs. at the top of that window, there should be the following: RESTART UPLOAD DEFAULT PASSWORD PROFILES. he needs to select PASSWORD. another window will drop down with the following message:

To connect to the AirPort network created by this base station from a computer not using Airport software, you should use the following:
Hex equivalent password (WEP key):

and then there will follow an incredibly long list of numbers and letters. you need to then use that password to connect.
posted by violetk at 8:47 PM on August 20, 2008 [1 favorite]

If the WEP passphrase he's using is less than 13 characters, try padding the passphrase with spaces at the end.
posted by tomierna at 8:58 PM on August 20, 2008

Response by poster: Violetk - that worked! Thanks to everyone for your assistance.
posted by mammary16 at 9:47 PM on August 20, 2008

Your friend should switch from WEP to WPA. WEP is not secure. WPA also gives you the advantage of picking a passphrase instead of having some random numbers and letters thrown at you.
posted by damn dirty ape at 7:26 AM on August 21, 2008

...but you should still throw random numbers and letters into your WPA passphrase. At least a dozen, preferably more.
posted by PueExMachina at 4:37 PM on August 21, 2008