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Apple Knowledge Base articles on connecting to Airport Base Stations using third party WiFi cards cover the problems encountered when using WEP to connect to the *hardware base station*, and give solutions to these problems, but do not offer solutions to users connecting to *software base stations*.
When connecting to an Airport Base Station (hardware) with a third party WiFi card, in order to use WEP, you need to use the Network Equivalent Password on the client using the 3rd party WiFi card, not the passphrase you would on a Mac equipt with an airport card. (See article http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106424).
Software Base Station (Internet Sharing on Mac OS X), however, does not offer the facility of generating the Network Equivalent Password for your 3rd party clients to use. The solution is as follows (credit to Darren Conrad for his post on this topic):
* Download Wep Key maker from http://www.chally.net/.
* Use it to generate a hex key from your favourite passphrase (I'd suggest a 128bit key). This is a non-Apple version of the Network Equivalent Password.
* On the software base station, enter this hex key, *preceded by the dollar sign* as the network password. The use of the dollar sign will stop the software base station from thinking that you have entered a phrase, and it will not generate a network equivalent password of its own (which would be inaccessible to you). Use of the dollar sign is, so far as I can tell, documented in client-access use, but not on the software base station.
* On the computer using the third party WiFi card (I used the inexpensive Buffalo PCMCIA card) enter the hex key without the dollar sign (on the Buffalo card, you precede the hex key with 0x to indicate that it is a hex key and not a phrase that you are entering).
* On Macs using airport cards, enter the passphrase you had used to create the hex key
All will now work fine: Airport equipt Macs will be able to connect to the software base station using the passphrase, and Macs/PCs using third party cards will be able to connect using the hex key, all WEP 128 encrypted!
Constantine
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