Thetownend.com

Does anyone out there have some knowledge of wi-fi?  I worked from the boat today and linked into the wi-fi using my work laptop.  This evening I reverted to my personal laptop and had all manner of shit logging in.  I went back to the work laptop and eventually got logged on but what is going on?  Should I clear down something before I try and log on with a different computer?  Or should I just say fuck it and buy a 3G card?  I only ask because Square Mile have just sold out to BT openzone and my monthly payment is set to go up from 10 to 20 quid a month the fucking cunts.

I have no knowledge at all, however, kudos for such an ace thread title.  8)

Seconded.

I take it these laptops have in-built wifi, rather than you using a wifi card?

If so, it's probably something to do with Square Mile's logon system rather than your hardware. The laptop's will have different MAC addresses and the Square Mile system probably gets confused when you're using the same logon on different MAC addresses.

In your internet settings, make sure you've got 'never dial a connection' selected.

Absolutely, I'd assumed it was some kind of dedicated porn broadband. Erm, do what Sam said

There is a TEF wifi jinx going on.  my cunting router died, put in the backup router. Can I get the desktop to talk to it with WEP security on. Can I bugger. Laptop works fine. Wii works fine. Grrr.

Maybe if I put the phrasekey in hex it'll work. Hmmm.

What OS is on the desktop Batch?

XP. It was working fine on the old router. I *cough* thought I configured the backup router the same way (same SSID/WEP settings).  Stupidly I deleted the old profile on the desktop, so can't be sure how I configured it before (mind you, the passphrase shows up as ******, so that isn't useful anyway.

I'll make sure it released the old IP address, then 'open' the wireless security to check that works, then piss around with the security again. Fecking computers!

i have a BT home hub and installed the software that came with it on my lap top.  I was getting loads of problems, it would take minutes to log on to my home network, if i went anywhere else it would still try to connect to that despite me being in an airport 500 miles away and not notice the flidding network i was sitting right next to, would interrupt anything i was doing to tell me that there was no wireless connection when i turned the wi-fi switch off anyway.  

the final straw came when i had just fought a heroic victory in a game of rome total war and the bastard crashed - the problem something called McciTrayApp taking up 1.3 GB of virtual memory.  I finally tracked it down as the little icon that tells you if the BT software has connected to Wi-Fi or not.  

While waiting for BT support to come up with something useful, I took matters in to my own hands and uninstalled absolutely everything by BT/yahoo! using msconfig - and now with the standard XP wireless manager it connects to networks in seconds, gives me a list of alternatives that are actually in range, doesn't crash  other things when its bleeding turned off anyway.  

I quite enjoyed informing Mr. Mukherjee from BT technical support that the solution he came up with (buy a better computer...) was no longer necessary for the reasons above, and also renamed my wirelss network "BT-are-rubbish" - I hope for the appreciation of anyone else in range.

Simple solution - plug the router into a computer with a cable and access the router's menu. You'll find the WEP key in there, or you can change it.

Thanks Sam will give that a try.

i'm a bit scared of wi fi, i reckon in ten or twenty years we'll discover we've been giving ourselves cancer of the mind all this time.

I won't worry, it can't be worse than supporting Oxford!  :D

hardy ha

Thanks Si. Don't think my post wast clear. I know what the WEP key is. I configured it this morning. I managed to get the wireless on the laptop working within 20 seconds.

I think the desktop card driver is being what is known as "a shit".
It has two mutually exclusive options for shared/WEP, a 'passphrase' and 'ascii' option. One should be able to take the key as a 13 char string (e.g. 'password12345'), but neither work.

I'm guessing the driver fucked up the char string to (ascii) hex conversion it needs to do before using it to authenticate, it rings a bell from when I originally installed the card (years ago) . I'll dig the ASCII table out, convert it to hex and try that!

Sounds a bit of a long winded way to get around it Batch. I take it you're entering it as ASCII but it's having trouble converting it to Hex and then authenticating?

To save you trouble working out the Hex manually, there's a generator here: http://www.powerdog.com/wepkey.cgi

That tool is useful thanks.

You are correct, typed the key in as a string "password..." but it won't authenticate at all. I'm guessing the config tool does not work properly for some reason.  There is a reason it was £7!

I think I recall that I if I convert the string "password..." to ascii hex (70617373776f7274...) and use that it works from there on in.

Wish I'd have remembered that this morning, then I wouldn't have snapped at the misses, and consequently wouldn't be in the shit house.

Must be some proper old router you have. On mine I simply go into the router UI, choose WEP and enter a key, connect from my PC where it prompts for the WEP key, enter it and away you go.

It's the desktop PC card driver,  the routers fine.   The router and laptop are as you describe :)

It's alllliiiiive.

Worked fine in the end despite doing nothing different to this morning. Oh well.

SNAP! just got back and switched on and the problem has gone away.  I did Sam's bit about switching off dialling though