Ed Hansberry

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WyattEarp

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Making use of mobile tech like no other.

szamot

Pony99CA

Could HP have made this any more confusing? :roll: As discussed in the "New WiFi Firmware/Drivers for 5550 available" thread, these updates seem more painful than necessary.

Steve

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Silicon Valley Pocket PC
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Andrew

gorkon280

gorkon280

You broasdcast yoru BSSID??? Bad thing. You don't specifically mention it, but from what you say is happening it looks like thats what you are doing. Turn off the broadcastung of the BSSID, then configure it. The 5555 will connect to it even if it never shows up in a bubble. To configure, click on the connection icon after turning it on, then click settings and go to the advanced tab. Clicking on network card will bring up your list of AP's that it sees. Don't worry if you can't see it...thats OK! Thats what we want! Tap Add New and add your AP's name and then tap on Network Key and enter in the appropriate info depending on if you need WEP or WPA. Enter in the key. Click out of the screen and it should connect.

Why do you not want to broadcast your BSSID?? First, it's harder to hack your AP if they can't see it. They may be able to tell you have an AP, but they will have to work much harder to find out the name and then they also have to guess your WEP key or WPA Key or scan enough packets to pick the WEP key up. It's not the total security panacea, but it adds another layer.

Also, regarding the BSSID, change it from the default. you don't know how many people I have seen who broadcast their ID's have the default linksys or 2wire as their AP name. Defaults are bad things on AP's!

joelevi

<sarcastic>Where's the ROM? I think HP is just waiting for all of us to put our wallets back in our pockets & give up on them before they release the WM2003SE ROM (I need the 4150/55 ROM).</sarcastic>

From a marketing perspective, if I were HP, I'd wait until my new line of iPaqs (with WM2003SE on them) were in the channel and on the shelves for a few months before I released a "non-necessary update" to end users (thus hoping some consumers would purchase the new units, partially to get the new OS).

I have been broadcasting my BSSID from my Linksys WRT54G ever since I got my 4155, I couldn't "see" it to be able to connect to it otherwise.

Thank you for showing me how to do it "the right way!"

jt3

WPA is definitely much more secure than WEP. For one thing, it uses a rotating encryption scheme (in fact, it uses a different key for each 802.11 frame), whereas WEP uses only a static key. WPA also adds integrity checks to ensure that the frames haven't been tampered with along the way, something WEP lacks. There are a ton of other features, and while WPA isn't perfect, it is designed to eliminate all of the flaws in WEP.

However, be warned. Since most of you don't have the RADIUS server required for true WPA (which uses 802.1x), you'll use the "Pre-Shared Key" variety (WPA-PSK). This type of WPA has been found to be easily cracked ***IF*** you use a passphrase that is susceptible to dictionary attacks. In other words, make sure your passphrase is at least 20 or so characters long (spaces don't count) and have a good mixture of upper/lower case letters, numbers, and non-alphanumeric characters.

By the way, on my home network, I DO happen to have a RADIUS server setup for 802.1x authentication, and I can tell you that with these new patches, my network is now WEP free. My iPAQ was my only non-WPA-capable device, which brings up another good point. For you to get rid of WEP completely, your Access Point, your wireless (client) hardware (e.g. PCMCIA cards for laptops), and your operating system (or at least the software handling your wireless connection) must ALL support WPA. If they don't, they'll fall back to WEP encryption. If your don't have WEP active, then those clients won't connect. Windows XP (even with SP1) doesn't support WPA, but there is an update available through Windows Update (it's not one of the critical ones, so you need to select it to install it).

At any rate, I use true WPA with 802.1x, and my iPAQ accesses the network (and more importantly, the internet) just fine. It was a pain in the butt to register my locally-generated certificate on my iPAQ, since I don't have a cradle available at home, and the root certificate must be installed and registered BEFORE you can access the WLAN, but once I exported my root certificate, and (via the SD card) installed it on the iPAQ, things fell in place.

For those of you with RADIUS servers, keep in mind, that the iPAQ does not generate (or use) a computer object in Active Directory, so you'll need to limit the USER OBJECTS that can authenticate if you want to prevent alien iPAQs from accessing your network. Of course, these unauthorized iPAQs would still have had to get your root certificate somehow, so there's not much to worry about here. Just something to keep in mind.

jt3

I just noticed this, and thought I should point out. SP27595 incorporates all of the changes in SP27632, so there's no need to install that first SP. Just make sure you have ROM v1.10.10 (SP27674), then install numbers 2 and 3 in the list above (in that order), and you'll be fine.