WEP key format

[mikeavison]

Hi
I am very much a newbie on Puppy. Using v 4.3 boot from CD was a dream, Transferring to USB stick a bit sticky, Cruzer would not work but Freecom worked first time. The hardware is an ACER Extensa 5220 with on-board Broadcom wireless connector.

My real problems happened trying to use wifi connection to router (Edimax). I use WEP 64 bit encryption. On the router I use 64bit WEP encoding, which I enter as a 5 character ASCII string. Using Puppy's network wizard I was not able to connect for a while. I suspected it was the WEP code causing the problem which I confirmed by disabling it on the router, connection worked. So I put it back on again and searched this forum for the answer. There were a lot of posts by
-kind folk who can't talk at my low level (i.e. I didn't understand them)
-people who just could not get it working despite all the complex advice
-some wrong information (e.g. you CANNOT enter it as ASCII by prefixing the string with s:)

It did seem you need to enter it as hex so I went on the net to find an ASCII to hex converter and got my 10 hex characters.

Then I tried putting them in with no separators and with a range of different separators that I had seen on this forum or elsewhere. I tried . # % : and , (ie dot , hash, percent, colon, space, comma).

The short answer is that the only character of the ones I tried which worked was , (comma).

WALLAHEY!!!! Joy.

Take home message is that if it had said this in the help file it would have saved me some angst and lots of time.

Actually due to one post I switched to using the older network wizard in the distribution. I expect it would have worked with the new one as well.

I'm really sorry to any oldbies who find this posting verbose and annoying but it is the style of posting I would have appreciated when searching the forum, maybe other newbies would too.

I didn't mean to sound chippy.

Thanks hugely to all the experienced folk who made this exciting distribution of Puppy possible.

Mike

[Fishback]

A post in this forum from October 8 by Aitch pointed to another helpful post from tobydog. Tobydog found a particular text to ascii converter very helpful when setting security on his network. Maybe you'll have better luck with that converter, referenced here:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 554#348554