Another "PB1400 goes wireless" story

[dudejediknight]

This year so far hasn't been a winner when it comes to snagging the various bits and pieces that I'm hunting for. Though it seems that maybe my luck has finally changed. b:

I saw someone selling a Lucent branded Orinoco PC card at a yard sale... and I didn't have the information in front of me whether it'd be the right type of card or not. Talked them down from $15 to $10 and made the deal. I was hopeful that it would be the right type of card, and managed to find a bunch of other little things on the day's travels.

Once I got back home, I searched online for one of the various walkthroughs on the web... and got a bit disheartened when they all seemed to specifically mention WaveLan cards, which mine was not. Still, I decided to go ahead and give it a try... what more did I have to lose at that point?

First, the pb1400's CD drive was being finicky when it came to the driver CD, so I had find and download the right driver (v6 since she's only running 7.6). Almost seemed like the old girl was resisting. I saved the driver onto a Zip disk for transfer to the PB1400. The installer actually ran, and said it had installed the drivers. Then I had to restart.

Once it restarted, I was shocked that the card was not coming up as an option. Was the old girl still fighting me on this? Or was the card not the right kind like I had feared?

Actually, it turns out that the card came up as 'ethernet' when installed in the upper PC card slot, or 'alternate ethernet' when in the lower slot. Seemed weird, but since ethernet wasn't available as an option before, I figured that it HAD to be the wireless Card. After that, it just came down to reconfiguring the wireless router to let the MAC address of the wireless card onto the network and then installing iCab onto the old girl. Then I'd know for sure whether it was or wasn't working like it should.

Success!! The old girl was actually able to take her first tentative steps onto (or is into?) the internet... the layout of our main page looked a bit weird, but it was all there, short of all the modern bells and whistles. Unfortunately, she couldn't actually do much beyond that due to the lack of additional memory (just the original 12megs... > ).

Things are finally coming together for the old girl... $15 to rescue her from a flea market... plus $10 on eBay for the SCSI adapter (to use a SCSI Zip drive)... plus $10 at a yard sale for the wireless card... now all she needs is more RAM and a battery that actually works, and she's ready to head back onto the front lines.

 

[J English Smith]

Congratulations! More RAM does help and the WannaBe browser can let you at least read text on pages that are too full of script and content to come into IE5. I was sad to see yesterday that the BBC's "low" website seems to be no more. That was my home page for my 1400 in IE5. It can still bring in the new page, but it's a lot slower to load now.

It's fun to get the old 1400 on the net. Can't do much, but it's still cool to use it that way.

 

[jwmcfarlin]

That is awesome to read--I have a PB1400c sitting right next to me that I am going to try the same thing with, so it is good to see success.

Best,

John

 

[jwmcfarlin]

Just as a quick question to the original poster, did you do anything special with the encryption, for example did you go 64-bit or 128-bit WEP?

Best,

John

 

[dudejediknight]

From what I've heard, It's usually such a pain getting older and newer stuff to agree on the type of encryption to use.

I actually went without any encryption since I wasn't going to be doing anything on it that would need to be encrypted. But as I had said, the wireless router is set up to limit wireless access to just a list of specified MAC addresses... so the network itself is not totally wide open. Unless someone goes to the trouble of spoofing one of our MAC addresses, they can't just hop onto our network.

Also, we actually don't do any of the really important stuff over unencrypted wireless. For those kinds of things, we just use the machine that's hooked directly to the router via ethernet. Then we don't have to worry about who might be snooping on our wireless packets.

 

[jwmcfarlin]

Very cool. I've got mine working now too in the same way, using MAC Address Control. I live in an out of the way place. I'll have to try to enable WEP sometime, but when I tried it tonight it wouldn't work. Perhaps a matter of channels or some such.

Best,

John

 

[LCGuy]

To connect to your WiFi network, do you use a WEP passphrase, or hex key? While I think most non-Apple WiFi routers just use the hex key (which is exactly what you need, put a 0x (for example, if your hex key is 0A1B2C3D4E5F6G, you'll need to enter the hex key into the control panel as 0x0A1B2C3D4E5F6G) in front of it when entering it into the ORiNOCO control panel and you should be good to go), Apple AirPort base stations typically use a WEP passphrase by default, though you can get the hex key from the AirPort Utility. Via use of the hex key, I use 128 bit encryption on my WiFi network, and my PB1400 is able to connect and use the network with no trouble at all.

 

[tom7447]

Same here. Like LC Guy I use the WEP hex key and encryption. Also have MAC address control on. And my 1400c connects fine. I'm using a Lucent WaveLan Gold card and running System 7.6.1.

I've had it set up for almost a year now but I still haven't taken to the local Starbucks for free Wi-Fi and to 'show off'

Someday

I admit it did take me a day or two to figure exactly how to get it to connect to my home network (typing in the network name manually and all the control panel settings). Trial and error really and I got there in the end