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[Hate On] Wireless Router issues
davidbarry
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm here playing "IT guy" at my aunt's place. Fucking yay.
She has a DSL connection of the PPPoE variety. A tenant is wanting to connect to her router wirelessly, and I've got to figure out how to do this. The tenant's laptop is running Vista. Simply trying to connect (after typing in the appropriate WEP password) doesn't seem to work, so I assume I've got to change the connection type on the tenant's laptop to let it know it's a PPPoE connection and have it automatically enter the proper username and password prior to entering in the WEP key.
She has a DSL connection of the PPPoE variety. A tenant is wanting to connect to her router wirelessly, and I've got to figure out how to do this. The tenant's laptop is running Vista. Simply trying to connect (after typing in the appropriate WEP password) doesn't seem to work, so I assume I've got to change the connection type on the tenant's laptop to let it know it's a PPPoE connection and have it automatically enter the proper username and password prior to entering in the WEP key.
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The router handles PPPoE, the client just connects to wireless with DHCP.
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Not having worked with PPPoE, this is just off the top of my head, but (assuming the wireless router is the first thing right after the DSL modem) I believe the PPPoE authentication has to occur on the router, and that the router must support it. Many, but not all, routers have PPPoE configuration pages.
If the wireless router cames after the DSL modem and/or router, and another device is authenticating on behalf of the user, you should be able to just hook up the wireless router and configure everything as if you were on a stock, non-PPPoE network.
Think you need to configure the router to authenticate on behalf of the user. Then you can set up the user's laptop to do wireless as usual. You may need to remove or disable the PPPoE client software from the laptop though if it interferes with network settings. I don't know that you can tunnel the authentication through the wireless router and have the laptop authenticate the connection, since the router isn't doing the authentication, I don't think the connection on the WAN side of the router will ever get brought up correctly. Someone who's more familiar with PPPoE may be able to offer a different solution.
Except that the tenant's laptop is having zero luck connecting. Hrmm... It asks for the WEP password, but tells me it is invalid after typing it in. Thanks for the help thus far.
Also, WEP is terrible so if the computers involved aren't incredibly old use WPA instead - but even before that, you might want to get it working without security, just to narrow the problem down to encryption.
Thanks. It turns out that the WEP encryption was the problem; both laptops are working fine without security on the connection. Are there any weird character limits on WPA encryption that I should know about?
Probably exactly what you ran into, and what the OP is now experiencing. Every vendor can do this in a slightly different way, and so they may not be compatible.
Suggest entering the password on the router and client as hexadecimal 10-digit (40/64-bit keylength) or 26-digit (128-bit keylength) key, and using that on both ends of the connection. PITA to enter (because it's easy to make typos), but it should work reliably. If the router fills in the Key 1-4 fields, pick a field (you probably ought to start with Key 1, some devices won't work correctly with a Key Index other than 1), and use that as the manual key on the client. Otherwise, get a random Hex number op the appropriate length, fill that in the Key 1 field, and use the same number on the client.
You will probably have to reboot the router if you change any of the major wireless settings on the router like the key, so make sure you commit you changes on the router and reboot before trying to connect on the laptop.
WEP and some of the other authentication methods can be really, really fussy, unfortunately.
Actually, come to think of it, I know of at least one old and shitty wireless card that can't connect my WPA-secured network, even though it detects the network's WPA-ness. Could a similar problem be at work?