Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Wireless Notworking

A friend who lives in a nearby flat is moving soon and so arranged for his broadband connection to be disconnected. He gave his provider the one month's notice they required. Typically, they disconnected it straight away like idiots, leaving him without t'internet. So I said I'd let him share my wireless connection for a bit.

Now, my router was setup to use WPA security, but annoyingly this isn't compatible with the Nintendo DS - it can only use the inferior WEP. All my other wireless things, the Xbox, the Wii and the computers are fine with WPA. But not the DS. Curse you Nintendo!

So I figured I'd take the opportunity to downgrade the security to WEP so that a) I wouldn't have to give away one of my (oh so secret) passwords and b) so that I could use the DS online.

I should have learnt by now that it's not the cleverest thing in the world to change the wireless security settings on a wireless router whilst connected to it wirelessly. As soon as you change the settings you lose the connection and then things seem to start going wrong. This time I managed to mess things up more than normal and it took me a good half hour to get things working again and in the process I deleted all my keychain passwords. That'll no doubt annoy me for a few weeks.

And through all that I never managed to get WEP working - I just couldn't get the computer to connect with it. No idea why, as I know I've made it work in the past. This time I was a bit annoyed and worried that I might f**k things up even more so I just re-set up WPA with a brand new password and left it at that. Now I think I have everything working again...

Anyway, the connection is apparently working from my friend's flat, so he's happy.

If anybody knows a way to get a DS connected to a WPA network, please let me know!

1 comment:

Chip said...

Think WPA is out for the foreseeable, but you could get a cheapo wireless router, set that up to use WEP and plug it into one of the wired ports on your main router. Then connect DS using the WEP router. No idea how much a "cheapo" wireless router would cost, but would expect on the order of £30.