moosepucky wrote:I have been unable to get the new (and getting older) laptop to connect to my wireless network for 2 months now. I gave up for a long time but I figured I had better get it working before it becomes obsolete.
It is running windows vista business 32 bit and I cannot find out how to get the mac address so that I can add this to the list of allowed connections.
For a long time I was a strong proponent of doing a myriad of things to ensure wireless security:
1. Turn off SSID broadcast.
2. Enable MAC filtering.
3. Disable DHCP and assign IP addies based on machine name or MAC.
4. Enable WPA2 with AES encryption.
5. Change your WPA2 encryption password every three or four months.
Through a fair amount of experience over the past year, I've slowly come to accept that steps 1 through 3 are useless. Steps 4 and 5 will provide you with just as much security and step 5 will provide you with the best security as long as you do step 4. I'd like to add one other step:
6. Use a strong password. IE a password with more than 8 alphanumeric and "special" characters. Something like 3do9$K43W4 would do nicely. Roboform has a nice password generator built into it. There are many others available on the internet as well.
One other pearl of wisdom:
Not all WAPs and WiFi cards play together nicely. A passphrase that a D-Link WAP accepts may not be functional in a LinkSys or Intel WiFi card. To get around this, you can try using a Hexadecimal password of 14 or 16 characters. (The exact number escapes me at the moment.) For some reason all WiFi devices that use WPA2-TKIP/AES will accept a hexadecimal password without problems. I suspect the standard was written in such a manner that hexadecimal is the real standard while "passphrase" implementation is dependent upon each vendor.
Yet one more pearl:
Look on the bottom of your laptop. MAC addresses are usually listed there. Otherwise, go to a command prompt and type in "IPCONFIG /ALL" and pick one of the MACs (aka: physical address) that show up there.
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