Need help connecting SB3 to wireless network

[mattnuss]

I am trying to connect my SB3 to a Linksys WRT54G router.
There is no encryption set and I specified the SSID, which I do not broadcast. However the SB3 cannot connect to the network.
I am using Windows XP SP2.

Any help would be much appreciated.

[notanatheist]

Your OS doesn't actually matter if your SB isn't getting on the network. Do you have any spaces or special characters in your SSID? Replace any spaces with an underscore "_" and try again.

[Mark Lanctot]

With my WRT54G, I can't get it to work without broadcasting SSID.

Connect with SSID broadcast first, then once you have established a connection, disable SSID broadcast. You may still be able to connect again. It worked once for me but no longer works, so I broadcast SSID now.

Not broadcasting SSID is not a viable security tactic anyway. Your SSID is broadcast by other means that can be detected by various cracking tools.

[mattnuss]

I verified that the SSID was correctly entered (required a few right arrow keys to display the "enter" arrow on the SB). Also enabled the SSID broadcast, but no luck getting a network connection.

[Mark Lanctot]

What version WRT54G do you have?

If it has firmware 4.20.6 or 4.20.7, it's a v4 or a WRT54GL. You should have no problems with these. I have yet to hear of anyone that couldn't make it work.

If it has firmware 1.x (?) it's a v5. The latest firmware should work, but the first version doesn't work - not even for basic networking without an SB.

[Mark Lanctot]

Go back to first principles.

Try it without encryption first. Enable SSID, change it to something new and reset the SB (unplug power, press and hold ADD, replug).

Find your new SSID from the list.

Now if that works, try WPA. A very simple passphrase at first. Try 'abcdefg'.

[mattnuss]

I was able to get the wireless connection by doing the following:

1)Hooked up the SB via a wired ethernet connection and was successful.
2)Then, I unplugged the power and ethernet cable and attempted a wireless connection setup with the SSID broadcast, which was also successful. I just disabled the SSID broadcast and the music is still streaming.

Thanks for your help in attempting to resolve this matter.

[vdeknock]

For the WPA key is the longer the phrase the better the encryption?

[Mark Lanctot]

For the WPA key is the longer the phrase the better the encryption?

Yes, but also, keep in mind the standard attack for WPA: the "dictionary" attack.

If the word cannot be found in a dictionary, you should be relatively safe.

Use capitals in the middle of words, use punctuation, purposefully misspell, intersperse numbers, anything to make it more complicated.

And the more characters the better.