Stupid Networking Question
29 Jan 2013 20:41:52 UTC
Topic 196778
(moderation:
I was having trouble with crappy wireless adapters on my crunching machines, so I bought a wired extender that uses a Wi-fi protected setup push-button to connect them all to the network.
After pushing the button on my router and connecting the wired extender to the network (which works great), now none of my wireless computers can connect to the network; the network password is not recognized, nor is the login ID / password to the router recognized for me to make changes.
How do un-kludge this?
Stupid Networking Question
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Nearly all such gadgets have a little ( red? and hidden round the back in a recess in the molding ) switch to reset to factory defaults. That'll give you some dumb login/password combo like 'admin'/'password' .... see the fine manual .... you can generally reconfigure from there, once you're in.
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
Thanks, I just found the
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Thanks, I just found the recessed button to reset. I'm just wondering why adding a WPS device would break the normal WPA2 wireless login / password (as well as my ability to log into the router). Not having used a WPS device before, I just assumed this push-button method was an extra protocol to add it -- if it means I have to make the entire network WPS, I'm not really keen on that. I'm hoping either I did something wrong, or that I have a crappy router that won't let both WPA-2 and WPS logins simultaneously.
I'd deduce that the
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I'd deduce that the assumptions behind the functionality of that setup push button don't match with your intentions. I've found that these gadgets do need micro-managing.
I have a 'Bob2' : an all singing and dancing ADSL link ( which re-syncs the DSLAM port at the local exchange if needed! ), wireless and wired router, answering machine, hardware stateful-packet-inspection firewall, packet phone port defaulting to analog, plus alarm clock which did come with a one-size-fits-all setup program. Then spent three days intermittently talking to tech support to get it to actually function, one of whom asked : 'why did you buy that?'. My reply was : 'because your company recommended it' .... and he said "Yeah, we had to shift those." Groan.
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
Feh...I just found the answer
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Feh...I just found the answer after resetting my router to factory defaults, updating its firmware and re-doing my entire wireless network. The answer wasn't on the company's website, but buried in an Amazon.com discussion of my router, where a company representative was participating: if I enable WPS on the router, devices which do not support it will not be able to connect to the network. So, in other words, I hosed my network by adding this device...and in reading up on all of this, I also discovered that WPS is horribly unsecure and that I probably shouldn't be using it anyway (not that I think there are legions of hackers roaming my semi-rural neighborhood, but still...)
Silver lining I guess, my router needed a firmware update and it was probably time to change my network ID and password.
Thanks for the help.
Pfft...a completely
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Pfft...a completely undocumented feature, which I learned only by web searching: the device has a Web interface, like any router. I was able to set it up properly to link to my network using WPA-2 / AES, by hard-wiring it to my router, looking up its IP in the router's DHCP client table, and then typing the IP into my web browser. The WPS button was just a "convenience".
Arghh. Right. If you must use
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Arghh. Right. If you must use the weak encryption protocols then use the longest allowable validator with utterly random content. So that would take a long bow shot to break. But it's been cracked. So the default computer security is the room you lock it in, implying you don't radiate out through the walls.
The Catch-22 with encryption is that we already do have the unbreakable code. The concept is centuries old and could be called a 'true randomly generated one-time pad', however the key is as long as the message itself and that key must be transmitted utterly securely. But if you could transmit the key that way then why not use that channel for the payloads anyway and forget encryption .... :-)
So that would be IP = 10.1.1.1 ??
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal