Airport cards that support WPA2?

[jdlanza]

Has anyone looked into creating Airport cards having the legacy Orinoco Gold form factor but that will support WPA2?  I'm looking to get some old Macs on my wireless network and would like to avoid provisioning a second network just for the legacy devices.  Plus, it would be hella cool.........

I'm thinking that it would require flashing the Gold cards with some some new firmware and perhaps also writing a driver for Mac OS to talk to the "new" card properly.

Anyone?

 

[Byrd]

My (hardware amateur) thought is that WPA2 requires a lot more overhead to for a PCMCIA card to process than WPA; it's not the software but hardware as well.

Lots of effort when you can get an Edimax EW-7811Un cheaply, and it supports PPC OS X 10.4/10.5 - the driver runs a little program and I've found it to be quite good.

https://www.edimax.com/edimax/download/download/data/edimax/global/download/for_home/wireless_adapters/wireless_adapters_n150/ew-7811un

JB

 

[Challenger 1983]

Are AirPort cards PCMCIA?, I just looked at one I had laying around and realized they have the same connector. Does this mean the AirPort slot could accept a PCMCIA card? 

 

[jdlanza]

Are AirPort cards PCMCIA?, I just looked at one I had laying around and realized they have the same connector. Does this mean the AirPort slot could accept a PCMCIA card? 

Yes, as I understand it, the Airport cards are PCMCIA cards.  Not sure if one can just plug a random PCMCIA card into the slot.

 

[bibilit]

IIRC connector is identical but not pcmcia complaint.

so wouldn’t work...far too easy. 

 

[Dandu]

The first AirPort Card is a "subset" of PCMCIA. Actually, you can use an AirPort card into a PCMCIA slot, but not a classic card on the AirPort slot (i think Mac OS and Mac OS X just block that).

And you can't use WPA2 with this sort of card.

To have WPA2 on Mac with AirPort original slot, the only is to use a CardBus card with Broadcom chip. Many card are "AirPort Extreme" compatible and can use WPA2. But you can do that only on PowerBook with CardBus (and Mac OS X)

 

[Challenger 1983]

Interesting, thanks for the response 

 

[jdlanza]

And you can't use WPA2 with this sort of card.

@Dandu, why do you say this?  The main issue, as I see it, is that WPA2 requires AES as the encryption cipher, which is not supported by the original AirPort cards.  Why can't one flash an original card to implement AES?

 

[Dandu]

Technically, it's (perhaps) possible, but Apple don't do that. Even if you flash the card (or use a "compatible" card), the driver don't do that. 

I suppose it's a little bit complicated to make a new driver to do that, and by the way, many Mac can use an AirPort Extreme (compatible) card.