Tuesday, April 4, 2006

One Touch Easy Setup my ass!  I finally broke down and bought a wireless router yesterday because they're cheap, and I didn't have any other excuses except that it looks complicated.  But everyone assured me it's easy as pie (like I know how to make pie).  Their 80 year old grandmother could do it, etc.  Plugging it all in was easy.  Making it secure (which it won't try to do by default) sucks.  So yeah, it's easy if you want to leave your network open.  I spent hours figuring out htf to set up a password.  I tried Live Chat with their technical help.  He gave me a wizard that would do it for me but only at 64 bit encryption.  Fine, I didn't care anymore even though that low of encryption is years old technology. 

I run the wizard.  It does something with the router.  I try the client side on my laptop and it errors out.  Sigh.  Of course the software won't work on Galahad's Mac, but I can manually copy/paste some long encryption key from a  text file, etc.   I just want to be able to enter a password and go.  Why is this so hard?  I decided not to go back to Live Chat.  I ask around about WEP vs. WPA vs. all of the other ones.  WPA doesn't appear as an option on the Mac.  Sigh.  My laptop is fighting between the Windows wireless configuration utility and IBM's.   Everyone says use IBM.  I disable Windows, and still no luck.  I go back to the Mac and monkey around a bit (even though I am about 5% proficient with a Mac).  I find where I can make it WPA & WPA2.  Yay!  Can't find WPA2 on my Windows XP laptop.  WTF??? 

I eventually get the Mac connected.  Yay!  I update the drivers on my laptop, try reinstalling, etc.  Finally, I use the Windows utility and it finds it.  And now that it does, so does IBM.  Fkrs.  All of 'em.  So, now I've kept out all of the amateurs but I'm sure my network is still unsecured for professionals, but I kind of don't care anymore.