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ibook wireless

hrsetrdr

hrsetrdr

macrumors member
Original poster
Perhaps this should be in a different section, but my question has less to do with general networking, but more to do with defining the problem.

Case in point:

I have an ibook G3 700 with an Airport card(just the 'regular' one, I guess) and have OS X 10.2.8.

My wireless router is a Linksys WRT54G v6. I have WPA Personal selected, have setup a SSID name, am using TKIP algorithm, have a WPA shared key.

I have tried all the obvious entry configurations in the ibooks wireless setup utility, but cannot connect. Note: the ibook does recognise my WPA network without prompting, it just isn't joining it.

My question(s)

Is it a hardware/firmware limitation of the Airport card?

Is it the OS X 10.2.8

Is it the ibook itself(rather doubt it)?

Or, is just me? 😱
 
A quick Google search seems to say that the original airport cards don't support WPA security in hardware.

BUT... apparently Apple added software support for WPA in Airport Update 3.3. Which I'm not entirely certain about, but I think is only available for 10.3 upwards. If so, that would explain why it's not working for you.
 
I just booted up the ibook, will see if there are any relevant updates. In terminal, "dmesg" just reveals what looks like a MAC address( 00:30:65:14:2b:e9) but is referred to as a driver for the Airport card. Short of yanking the Airport card out of the ibook, is there any way to get a better ID ?
 
Well, either the Airport card itself is not capable, or 10.2.8 is not able to negotiate a WEP connection(suspect the latter). At any rate I did a little wireless signal survey by driving out and around the area of my house with my other laptop; the closest house is well over 400 feet away, and the signal fails(no bars) long before I get to one. I feel confident that I can just drop the security for the period that I'll be using the ibook. Not the best solution, but I'll have to investigate further. 😉
 
hrsetrdr said:
Well, either the Airport card itself is not capable, or 10.2.8 is not able to negotiate a WEP connection(suspect the latter).
Click to expand...
Or, if what I came up with was correct, both--the card isn't, and 10.2 can't compensate for that deficiency.

Only way to find out for sure would be to upgrade to 10.3, of course.

As for the MAC Address, won't System Profiler tell you what the hardware address is? Come to think of it, Network Utility should as well--is it showing something else? (If by "...better ID" you meant you were looking for the chipset, those cards are all Lucent WaveLAN Gold PC cards in a modified case.)
 
At this point I'm still not sure exactly which is to blame(Airport or 10.2 or both) but eariler I booted the ibook to an Ubuntu 6.06 "live" CD session, and the Airport card worked great, until I enabled Security on the WLAN. There were features in the Ubuntu network configuration utility for the security key, but still no connect. The 00:30:65:14:2b:e9 is the MAC address for the ibook; I even tried MAC filtering, enabling the ibook and my other laptop as the only machines allowed; no luck there either, but just as I type I realize I need to test that further as I may not have set that up right, with the router.
 
Maybe this is what you're saying, but one of the things I came up with was some people saying that Linux did not support WPA because the card didn't support it in hardware. They noted that Apple was apparently doing something to add it in software.

Of course, the posts I was reading could have been out of date, and I don't have any experience with Linux on Apple hardware.
 
Last night I hadn't gotten the MAC filtering feature set correctly in the router; got it set correctly now, ibook is connecting fine. I'll have to look into the details on this Airport card(has driver v. 310.4.0) and see if 40/64 bit encryption (WEP) will work; the ibook OS X 10.2.8 has all the latest updates(for 10.2.8) so I'll scrounge around some more on the Apple site.
 
Here's the bottom line on my ibook's wireless issue, straight from a genuine Apple Genius:

The Airport card in my ibook is 802.11B compliant. In order to negotiate a WPA connection I would need an Airport Extreme, which is 802.11G compliant. The Airport Extreme will not work with a G3, just G4's and newer. That's it in a nutshell...I just have to live with it.
 
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