kair: Intel Wireless Base Station and Airport

I have seen some previous posts on users trying to get an Intel Pro/Wireless base station to work with an Apple computer/Airport card. Well I was in the same boat wondering how to get this to work.

Well I found the answer to this mystery by doing lots of research on the internet. There two major points that must be adhered to. First, when using encryption you must use the 1st key only. For example there are 4 shared keys you can potentially use in an Intel Access point. Likely the same in many others such as 3Com etc. The Apple airport software looks for the 1st key only. If you are to use any other key than the 1st it will always fail. This goes for 128 or 40 bit encryption. As it is imparative that you put a $ sign in front of the encryption key as well or it will not work either. e.g $23Daf327 etc.... In Apple speak the password is the encryption key. This has been documented on Apple's support site.

The second important feature to observe, especially for Intel access points is something called preamble. In Intel access points by default this feature is set to short preamble. This default setting is to my understanding only for Intel wireless cards. For this to work with Apple airport cards this must be disabled so you will have long preambles. Technically I don't know what this means but according to Intel long preambles allow interoperability with 3rd party equipment.

After you have accomplished these simple steps you are up and surfing on the net wirelessly. As for the other areas of setup such as routers we have a Watchguard SOHO firewall conntected to cable internet. The firewall acts as a DHCP server as well. This is the info I have learned through many hours of freustration and wanted to share this with other people that may be having similar issues. Happy surfing on your Apple computer/airport card.