128-bit Airport Hack

mikerwpi

Registered
Has anyone tried using a non Apple 802.11 card in the internal Airport slot under OSX? Something like the Lucent Wavelan Gold card... I ask only because my school's campus wireless LAN uses 128bit encryption, not the 40 Apple supports.
 
Is the internal slot a PCMCIA slot? I thought it was proprietary. Do you have a laptop? You could try the external PCMCIA slot. If you could do a try-before-you-buy thing.

-Rob
 
I know a guy who is in the process of writing a driver for his cisco aironet card, so he can get it working under X.
Other than that, I have not seen anything about it.

Andrew
 
Why doesn't Apple use higher encryption in the first place? Granted it is a single that is constantly moving and would be hard to decrypt, but 40 bit is not high enough. I think Apple needs to offer airport cards that can use 64 and 128 bit encryption to save everyone some trouble.
 
Actually 64 bit WEP encryption is the same thing as 40bit WEP. WEP encryption uses a 24bit header, so 128 bit is really 102 bit encryption.


But you are right they should be using 128bit encryption. I think most other 802.11b cards support 128bit encryption. Do airport cards not support it or is it the airport base stations that don't support 128bit?


andrew
 
Botht he Airport carda nd the Airport Base Station use Lucent Wavelan Silver Cards (40bit). The internal slot is just a PCMCIA slot, which is why under 9.x you could pop in a Gold (128bit) card and be good to go. Basically it's a question of whether the Airport drivers in X still support the Lucent cards like they did in 9.x.
 
So there are really two PCMCIA slots in my Ti? Does that mean even desktops and iMacs have at least one PCMCIA?

In the case of an 802.11b card, though, you'd have to worry about the antenna if you tried to put it inside a laptop.

-Rob
 
Macs with Airport slots have built in antenna. You just have to unhook the one that the pc card comes with and use the Macs.

----
Firewire iBook 466, 10gig, 320meg, Airport, OS X
 
I guess I was picturing the cards like Cisco's that have a half-inch hard extension to the card. I didn't think they came off, but if they did: woo hoo cool.

-Rob
 
are we sure that the airport slot is a pccard slot?

i thot it was similar but lacking in some pin support...

cuz i dont think my $99 airport card is a full lucent silver card...


also the 40 vs 128 bit encryption dealie, is that when WEP came out, 40 bit was determined to be sufficient for Consumers...

hence the differences

oh and if you can convince yr network admins to allow 40 bit keys / encryption at work, most access points will support both 128bit and 40 bit encryption at the same time.
 
Lucent had drivers that worked with gold cards for OS 9, but has stopped further development. The driver in OS X does not work with a gold card (I've tried). There are some efforts to write a driver, but one suspects that Apple will get around to a gold version one of these days as the prices are similar and many corporate wireless LANs require gold cards (I know .. that isn't good enough, but that is the way things are).
 
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