Apologies for the reference in the subject to the Evil Empire's latest alphaware foisted on an unsuspecting public... I just thought this worthy of note.

A couple weeks ago, I had occasion to break from the network upgrade I was doing to visit a client whose two new Gateway notebooks (no, he didn't get them form me, nor did I recommend them - egad, no!) were having trouble connecting to his venerable LinkSys WRT11. I convinced him that it was indeed time to upgrade the router/AP, and start with a fresh WRT54G and perhaps opensource firmware (though I ended up sticking - for the time being - with the factory pack). Out we went to pick one up.

I configured the unit for WPA2 encryption, TKIP+AES, PSK (LinkSys refers to this as "Personal") which I find to be the most user-friendly (some non-standard clients have trouble with AES or TKIP - usually AES - so accepting both makes things a bit easier).

I was (as most of you on this list might guess) rather unimpressed with Vista, particularly on the substandard Gateway hardware (selling machines with Vista and only 512MB RAM is like selling W2K stations with 128MB...it's not even a bad joke). However, my impression of Vista was not simply as a result of the lackluster performance, but more the inordinate amount of clicking to get to the proper area to set things up (even after I figured out where it was).

Once connected, I turned off beaconing in the AP. The notebooks continued to work for the rest of the time I was there. I had a workstation downstairs with an older LinkSys PCI card in it, which I upgraded (the new card was defective, and kept dropping the signal; a subsequent replacement resolved the issue). A couple days later, my client called me to tell me that he couldn't get either of the notebooks to connect. After a few minutes on the phone, I had him log into the WRT54G from his wired desktop and turn beaconing back on. This seemed to resolve the problem.

I know we have kicked around on this list various issues with GenMAC and non-beaconing AP's. I generally do not have a problem, but I was wondering whether I missed a change in the RFC's somewhere? The workstation downstairs with the LinkSys PCI card had no trouble once I set up the profile with the (rather long) PSK. I was able to reboot several times and get right onto the network.