Wi Fi sucks! ⇒

November 22nd, 2003 by

Can you believe that it took two reasonably intelligent CSc grads over an hour to get a Linksys 802.11G card to talk to an Airport base station?! Dave's Airport was set up with some security so I needed to enter a magic number to get access. Usually you enter a simple passphrase that is translated into this magic number. Turns out that Apple and Linksys each use a different method to generate that magic number so the number I was sending was not the number that the Airport was expecting.

There are several obvious solutions to this problem: 1) wireless manufacturer's could decide on a standard! We think that Apple is the culprit here, not Linksys 2) Linksys' software could actually inform the user that the magis number they are using is incorrect 3) Linksys' software could detect that it is an Airport and use Apple's algorithm for generation.

But, it doesn't do any of those.