Yesterday, I had an interesting experience with an Apple Airport based wireless network. There’s a pre-existing network based on an Airport Extreme base station as well as an Airport Express, functioning as an extension to widen the reach of the network. This particular network was one I had set up a few years ago and it has been functioning just fine for the longest time. It’s had Macs connected via standard wired ethernet as well as using the wireless access.

But yesterday, a Dell laptop came to town. The goal was to get it online using the wireless, password protected, airport network. Sure, it could connect using an empty ethernet port on the network switch, but that’s the easy way out. With all this hi-tech wireless stuff, it should be able to login to the wireless network, right? All I needed was the password key for the network and then, voila! Well, that’s pretty straightforward, except for one problem.

I had to remember what password I used to set the thing up in the first place. Uggghhh! It could be one of about two dozen different combinations that I’ve used in the past. But before I could enter the pass key, I had to find the correct place on the Dell to enter the information. This particular laptop has Windows Vista installed. Well, ok, nothing’s perfect – I’ve got to work with what I have. After clicking through a few of Microsoft’s most helpful screens <sarcasm>, I found the right screen to let me attempt to log on to the Airport network – which it did locate in no time at all.

So, I went through a short list of likely candidates. Nothing. It didn’t like them, but at least it let me keep trying rapid fire. Eventually, I picked one that it didn’t reject outright. It spun it’s wheels before telling me that the Dell succeeded in connecting to the network, but failed to access the internet! At this point, I was not sure whether to blame Apple, Dell or Microsoft for the snafu. I was not (yet) ready to point fingers and wanted to be objective in my approach to solving the problem.

There were two likely possibilities as to what was causing the lack of internet connectivity. 1) The password key was right, but something was incorrect about how it was entered. 2) The password key was wrong, but was not rejected by Airport for some unknown reason. My hunch was that the solution would be found by pursuing the first possibility. The reason being that I recalled running into a similar situation a few years ago on a different Airport based network.

The solution that time was to enter the password key in hexadecimal format. Hexadecimal? What the -? I don’t know “why” this worked but I needed to log into the Airport base station itself to extract the network’s password key in hexadecimal. Thankfully, this information was provided to me upon request. I had to copy the lengthy password key and then paste it into the Network Login window and it worked.

Somehow, I remembered this obscure solution yesterday and figured that might explain how I could “connect” the Dell but fail to get internet access. OK, so all I needed to do was to log in to the Airport base station itself and extract the hex version of the password. Only trouble was, I needed to remember the password for the base station itself!! Oy!

Ironically enough, I was successful in quickly guessing the base station password with little difficulty. That got me “in” and I could check the configuration settings. First I wanted to be sure that anybody (with the right password) could log in. Nothing indicated otherwise, so I knew that the Dell should work. I got to the screen with the network password key on it. Of course it doesn’t show you the actual password but it does indicate how long it is. This clue helped me verify that the password I had tried was, in fact, the right one. However, it didn’t fully work. At this point, it probably was due to the hexadecimal problem. Somehow, I was able to generate the hex version which I then jotted down. It was a bunch (like 26 or so!) of seemingly random numbers and letters that make up the hex code.

This was definitely progress, and I felt like I was really close to making this work.

So I went back to the Dell with my password key in hex code. I entered the code very carefully, and…

It WORKED! Ta da! Houston, we have liftoff!

The Dell sprang to life as soon as it established a connection with the internet. All sorts of things began to kick in once it established an online presence. Nice! Needless to say, I was very happy to turn the laptop back over to it’s pleased owner who needed to check her email from the “road”.

In hindsight, I still have no idea why I needed to use the hexadecimal version of the password key. I assure you, I did not create the network with it – it was a standard WEP 128 key. But in the computer troubleshooting biz, sometimes you learn not to question why something is working – even if it doesn’t seem logical. Just be happy and move on…