what exactly is the point of having a wep key shared by 2000 people. except to have another thing for people to screw up when they try and type it in our paste it. thereby increasing the support overhead at the help desk. joelja On Thu, 20 Nov 2003, Alexandru Petrescu wrote: > Hi, I was not at the last IETF, and couldn't see live the reportedly bad > workings of WLAN. I am not going to make suggestions to 58crew since > I'm certain they've already tried lots of configurations. Just to share > our thoughts on how we make work several > independent/deterministic-behaviour 802.11b subnets: > > -for the general public, set the AP's with both an essid and a key, in > Infrastructure mode (managed). > > -for the aodv public, convene to use a different essid and a different > key and ad-hoc mode. If the aodv people need several ad-hoc mode > subnets, just set yet another essid+key; of course all essid's and > key's must be different each compared to the other. > > We have experience with several independent/deterministic-behaviour WLAN > links set up that way. > > But, even if this works well with several AP types and cards, there > exist cards out there that only support enc at 128bit while others only > at 64bit, which makes _any_ use of encryption non-portable. That says, > if ietf crew decides to put a key 64bit then there will be people not > able to connect. Same if it decides for 128bit. > > To me, the whole story is a matter of compatibility, backward > compatibility and forward compatibility between various versions of the > 802.11 standards _and_ of their implementations. > > It is exactly like with Word versions: it's the same Doc format but not > quite depending on the Windows version too. > > I do not think anyone could be blamed of "interfering" with a WLAN > network, most notably because this is unlicensed spectrum; I presume > harmonics of an old microwave oven could be blamed for interference with > the ietf wlan as much as a user not knowing his intel laptop has centrino. > > Alex > > > -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joel Jaeggli Unix Consulting joelja@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx GPG Key Fingerprint: 5C6E 0104 BAF0 40B0 5BD3 C38B F000 35AB B67F 56B2