Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Wi-Fi Protected Access: where Windows XP SP2 meets OS X

Setting up an encrypted wireless LAN with both Windows and OS X clients used to be very ugly. There was no implemented standard for WEP passphrases, so one had to work around cryptic hex keys. Well, at least if you're using XP SP2 and OS X 10.3.x or later the bad old days are history. Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) just works.

My AirPort Extreme is running WPA (my iBook doesn't seem to support WPA2, not sure if that's a Panther issue or a G3 issue). My XP SP2 laptop connecs using the same passphrase my Mac clients use. No problems at all. Apparently since May 2005 XP SP2 also supports WPA2.

This is so much better than WEP -- although I fear my aged iBook doesn't like the CPU burden ...

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