Powerbook 1400 WiFi - Possible to connect with WPA2 encrypt?

[J English Smith]

I mostly connect at home with my Pismos, but was thinking of trying to get the 1400s back online too from time to time, just for newsfeeds.

We have a new Mediacom cable modem, though, and it uses WPA2 encryption. (Got sick of dealing with CenturyLink for service problems.)

With the Pismos, I am using the Motorola WiFi cards rather than the installed Airport cards, as they cannot handle the WPA2 encryption.

With the old Orinoco Gold or Silver cards that I have for the 1400s, is there any hack to make them WPA2 compatible?

 

[naryasece]

Hmm some quick Googling suggests that these cards can have their firmware updated, but my guess is a custom firmware and driver software combination would be necessary to allow for WPA2.

Are the Pismos running Mac OS X? Or does the Motorola cards have a driver for the classic Mac OS?

 

[AichEss]

Out of the box the gold Lucent cards are WPA2 capable. I think the silvers are also - others may know for sure.

This is with OS 9.x; OS 8.6 should be OK as well with the proper AirPort drivers. Lucent's drivers for OS 8.0 and earlier aren't going to make it.

Note that you are limited to 802.11b by the card.

With the Pismos, I am using the Motorola WiFi cards rather than the installed Airport cards, as they cannot handle the WPA2 encryption.

Oh?

 

[Anonymous Freak]

The Lucent/Orinoco WaveLAN Silver and Gold cards are the same hardware as the original Apple AirPort card. Indeed, the first Graphite base station came with a Lucent WaveLAN Silver card inside it as the WiFi chip.

All are capable of WPA...

When running OS X 10.3 or later. Neither OS X 10.2 and earlier, nor any "Classic" version of the Mac OS (8, 9.) support WPA2 using built-in utilities.

Note that some third-party WiFi cards may support WPA on OS 9 using their own custom drivers, but I don't know of any. I just know that it would be the only way for it to be supported.

 

[J English Smith]

Shoot, thanks, sounds like that's a non starter then. The 1400s I had web ready are running 8.6.

All my Pismos and Lombards are on 10.4.11 and can hook to WPA with the airport cards and can connect to WPA2 using the pc csrds...the airport card won't do it...

 

[J English Smith]

Got up and running on the work network today...running Classilla 9.3.2 successfully on an Orinoco Silver card on our hospital's open network...currently successfully browsing the Washington Post's mobile site.

Not too bad for a 1996 machine with 40mb of hard RAM in it!

Need to shift my one 48mb RAM card into this machine tonight and then with 64mb hard RAM, it should be fine. At least I can still use this one at work!

 

[commodorejohn]

Do you mean you got WPA2 working on OS8/9? Do tell...

 

[J English Smith]

No, home has wpa2 but work is guest wifi just with javascript for the acceptance of permission. The only tough spot is having enough ram to run classilla and os 8.6...

 

[J English Smith]

Probably a short term thing as parts of our guest wifi do use a wpa2 protocol but for now, the bigger guest node is still open...