Re: God I hate macs

On 2007-05-06 06:12:38 -1000, George Graves <gmgraves2@xxxxxxxxxxx> said:

On Sun, 6 May 2007 02:14:29 -0700, Tim wrote
(in article <1178442869.742540.298310@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>):

No wireless internet on my Linksys WRT54GS using WEP. It works fine
and plays nice with XP on my Dell. My Macbook Running OS X (panther).
I've spent hours trying to set up the WEP password and trying other
options which I've read on the net and newsgroups. I've set up my
wireless to filter MAC addresses, adding my Macbook to it's access
list. There is nothing left to do now. The Airport connects to my
router, but won't travel to the internet.

The only way I can connect to the internet is without wireless
security, duh Apple. It turns out from what I've read is that the
Macbook Airport works on only 75% of wireless networks. Mine's not one
of them. Another reason Microsoft has 90% market share.


This is an area where Apple needs to do a lot of work. They are definitely
behind.

Here's what you have to do. On the Router end, most likely, it will ask for a
pass phrase or word. Lets use "tron" as an example. On most Windows machines,
you put "tron" in the WEP field as the password on the computer and you're up
and running. On the Mac, for some unfathomable reason, you can't just type
"tron" into the wireless Mac as the password. It won't work. My old Linksys
router and my new D-Link router both allow you to enable 128 -bit WEP. Then
you type in "tron" and tell the router to convert that to its HEX equivalent.
This yields a 26 character-long string that looks something like:

ABC72CF11902D2667E6C20ED10 (this one's made-up though)

Write it down and put THAT into the Airport-enabled Mac Laptop as the
password, and it will work.

I have never seen a wireless Network over which the Mac will not work, But
you must get the security right on it first.

BTW, WEP is old hat and easily broken, you should be using WPA2 (personal).
It has similar issues on Macs and I haven't been able to get it to work on my
new 802.11N router either, but I must admit, the day I tried, I gave up after
about a half an hour and haven't revisited it. I'll get back to it one of
these days and crack it, just as I did WEP on the Linksys.

Point is, that one shouldn't have to go through the trouble and to be fair,
if one bought all airport equipment, the wireless network just falls
together. You've never seen anything so easy. Its when you go with a generic
wireless router that the fun begins.

Then I can only suspect the issue is PEBKAC - Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair. I have an iMac, a MacBook Pro, two PCs, a PC laptop, and a network printer in my home network. The iMac, the two PCs, and the printer are on the wired side, whereas the MacBook Pro is either wired or wireless, depending upon the location when it's in use. That leaves only the PC laptop, which is only on the wireless side. You can say all you want about the Mac not beoing able to be used well with WEP, but I found exactly the opposite to be true.

This is ALL I had to do to setup WPA protection on my wireless network (the PCs could NOT do WPA2, so I had to throttle it down to WPA only). I brought up System Properties -> Network, then selected Airport and clicked on the Configure... button. Once there, I click on the + button in the Networks section to add my network. That brought up a window into which I typed my network name and selected the appropriate level of security, which is WPA in my case. After the OK button was clicked, I once again selected the Network (in the Network section) and clicked the Edit button. In the resulting window, I input my WPA password (the one previously entered on the router) and that was it. All I had left to do was to turn on my Airport using Internet Connect and I was on the net with no problems.

As I mentioned above, both of my Macs, when I had the wireless cards activated, were able to get on the network with no problems using WPA2 protection. The Windows PC laptops (there were originally two, but now we're down to one) could NOT connect to the network when WPA2 was used - ONLY when WPA was used. Both of them were running WinXP, so I can only assume that WinXP doesn't support WPA2. That is but one of the reasons I want to cleanse my house of the WinXP boxes. If I had a Mac-only house, I would have no problems using WPA2.


.