wep key index in examples of section 29.3 in handbook

Krishna Mohan Gundu gkmohan at gmail.com
Mon Aug 11 10:00:52 UTC 2008


Hi,

After I put some effort into building a ndis driver for my wireless
802.11g card, I proceeded to configure the network. For me the section
that seemed to be most relevant was "29.3.3.1.4 WEP". So I chose the
example as a template to configure my device. In the hindsight, after
spending a few hours in correctly configuring my wireless device, I
realized that the document could have saved me those hours if only it
had used wep key index of 1 instead 3 in the example. I would like to
raise the following concerns

1) A novice would not know that WEP access points can use any of the
four keys it uses for encryption and that all these keys have to be
set correctly. I got to know this only after reading the wikipedia
page on WEP at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wired_Equivalent_Privacy .
Further that most access points only use one key and I believe the
index of this key is mostly 1. This discussion could be added to some
subsection.

2) The above discussion can be deemed to be too technical to be
included in the document. However changing the wep key index from 3 to
1 would save many more novices like me hours of searching, reading,
agony etc.

The bottom line is "Is the wep key index most likely to be 1? If so
the document should use that number in the examples."

Please let me know if I should file a document bug about this.

regards,
Krishna.



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