Ain't Nuthin' But a 'G' Thang...

One of the vital things to make life livable in a new location is to get the net connection up and running. My desktop is in my bedroom on the second floor, and running cable throughout the house from JMD's router in the living room wasn't really an option. Off to Nerd World! (a.k.a. MicroCenter--actually, their sign is currently for MIC O CEN ER). I bought a desktop 802.11g card; hardware installation went just fine.

However, U5 set up the network to be as secure as possible--don't broadcast SSID, WPA password, etc. It's so effective, that even when you have the WPA password and login access to the router, you can't hack into the network!

The biggest problem I ran into was this:


Hrm... the provided WPA password is 64 characters. I tried all sorts of workarounds--truncating the password on the beginning or end, turning on broadcast SSID, looking up online hexadecimal to ASCII converters, etc. Finally, I came up with a primitive but effective trick. Log into the router, and make the WPA key 62 characters by deleting the last two letters. Worked like a champ.

Also, JMD has an unused PCMCIA (which is short for "people can't memorize computer industry acronyms") 802.11g card, so all machines in the house are now running at high speed... thus the title of the post (in case that wasn't obvious).

Just in time for 802.11n to become the expected default networking protocol. Oh well.