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HAVE I HELPED? |
SECURITY FOR WIRELESS ..... THAT WORKS!?
I recently purchased a 802.11g Linksys WRT54G Router, and a 802.11g WPC54G PC Card. My purpose was not really to get up to speed on the 54Mbs speed of 802.11g, but rather to upgrade the security on my wireless installs to WPA. It seems most of the vendors are going to introduce the WPA upgrades in the 802.11g products first, instead of the 802.11b. No wonder they have been having fire sales on the 802.11b products! It doesn't look like they intend to upgrade them to WPA.
Update February 2006: See below for my experience with WPA2.
You can look at this diagram to see my wired/wireless home network. I set a static IP on the WAN port of the WRT54G to 192.168.1.202/24, with a gateway of 192.168.1.254, which is my 2wire router that I use to access the ADSL line. I made sure to enable WAN management, turned off "block anonymous WAN requests" - so that I could ping it from the WAN side, and I set the LAN network to 192.168.3.0 [I can't duplicate networks or the routers will never figure it out!] I turned on 802.11g ONLY [interesting that there is this option - rather convenient for my setup where I already have two other 802.11b networks running]. I set the SSID different from the default -> kris, and left broadcast on for now. The WRT54G is running 1.41.2 firmware.
I installed the WPC54G PC Card using the drivers provided in my Thinkpad 600E running XP Pro [Finally sprang for the extra money for Pro!]
Well, guess what - no wireless connectivity of any kind. So first I reinserted the Ethernet PC Card in the Thinkpad, since I figured I would have to go and get some updates and such. Big surprise there, huh! But first I went to the Linksys site and got the WPA upgrades for the WRT54G - 1.42.2. The upgrade completed "successful" according to the Linksys. But absolutely nothing happened until I power cycled the WRT54G. Went back in via the browser thru the WAN port, and thankfully my changes were still there. It is not nice when they make you reinsert all your changes after an upgrade!
Now I went back to the Thinkpad and the WPC54G. I noticed I was running 3.10.27.0 firmware. The WPC54G was able to "see" the 802.11g "kris" network, but was not able to join it after clicking on the XP "connect" button. XP would just keep giving me the "one or more wireless networks are available" nonsense. There is just no way in hell that this firmware will connect to the WRT54g "kris" network. So off to the Linksys site using the Ethernet PC Card. Grab the zip file for the 3.20.21 firmware, unzipped it, went into device manager -> update driver -> properties -> driver -> update driver -> and select location where I unzipped the driver . Finished driver update, and voila! I had driver version 3.20.21.
Well, all of a sudden my 802.11g network is working.... Gee. Do you suppose they will get this firmware right one of these days? So let us do some experimentation.
I disconnected from the 802.11g "kris" network, and connected to the 802.11b "john" network provided by my BEFW11S4 Linksys router. This was after I entered the WEP key for the "john" network of course. I was able to disconnect from "john" and then connect to my Netgear 802.11b MR814 "glor" network, after entering the WEP key. So far, pretty good!
Now I decided to get really ambitious and try for WPA! First I went to http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=815485 to get the WPA patches for WinXP. I then turned on WPA in the WRT54G router, entered a pre shared key "kristina [which generates the keys], enabled WPA-PSK authentication & TKIP data encryption . I then went to the WPC54G and enabled WPA-PSK and TKIP [I notice AES is listed but certainly available yet until those new chips come in....], and gave it the pre shared key "kristina."
I can't believe this, WPA actually seems to be working!!!!
Now let's really get adventuresome. Let us remove the 802.11g PC Card WPC54G and put the 802.11b WPC11 back in the Thinkpad. It is supposed to interoperate with the 802.11G router, right!! Uh oh, would not connect to the 802.11g WRT54G router, but would connect to the 802.11b network "glor" - the Netgear MR814 router.
I had my wireless networks listed in order of preference "kris" - the 802.11g, "glor" - Netgear 802.11b, and "john" - the BEFW11S4 Why would this thing not connect to "kris?" Well, finally power cycled the WRT54G and voila - I would connect to 802.11g "kris."
Now I went to http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=826942 and got the wireless service pack rollup. Now the card came back up and connect to the "glor" 802.11b network again, instead of the 802.11g. Did the service pack break the wireless again? Well, no, I can always switch to kris, but it always seems to come up and pick "glor" first.
And that is where we are, ladies and gentlemen. Still working and experimenting with these issues. Stay tuned.....
In December 2003, I have notice the 142.3 upgrade for the WRT54G, which apparently fixes a problem with the dynDNS function available in the router. I wasn't using this, so was not a big deal. But I did upgrade, and so far no ill effects.
In December 2003, I noticed there is a 3.30.15 upgrade offered for the WPC54G PCCard. I have downloaded and upgraded to this driver, with apparently no ill effects to date. Release notes just talk about "WLAN monitor." You must be careful about downloading and installing this update. Be forewarned that it is a zip file, and that in XP, you have to go into "file -> extract" to unzip all the good stuff. DO NOT run the setup.exe - this is for Win98/ME/2K which doesn't have the (XP) Windows wireless zero configuration (i.e. the embedded Windows wireless software). You should spend some time organizing your present driver, along with this new one. Once you do the extract, then you need to follow the instructions to update the driver.
Update Mar 2007: You need to get the wireless client update package to fix security problems with WPA/WPA2. Microsoft does NOT push this package as a critical update!
Besides the Linksys forum at DSLreports, there are two other sites apparently dedicated to these Linksys wireless routers:
LinksysWrt54g - SeattleWireless
Tons of Linksys info in gerneral! Base Page.
Whoops! you got here before I did.... sorry.