OK, got another question for all of you who know more about this stuff than I do (insert self-deprecating "man, do I not know much about computers" comment here):
So I am in the unenviable position of not being able to hook my laptop up to the internet. At home I use a desktop that came with my apartment, which, sadly, can't communicate with my laptop (it was a bad decision not to order the disk drive, I now realize). At work, though, we have a wireless network, which should theoretically function with my laptop, 'cause it's all pimped out like that. Except that it keeps asking me for the "network key" before it will let me on. It seems like it should be pretty easy to obtain that, type it in, and off we go... but where do you find the "network key," exactly?
This is all very above board: we've paid dearly for our internet access and the hardware with which to scatter it about a bit, and I legitimately work here. I just don't know where to find this silly "network key". With the help of an actual professional, we got one laptop hooked up to the network, so I assume that somewhere within that laptop, the elusive key exists, but where do I look? (I looked in there and found some "addresses" and a "mask" and a "gateway", but no keys.) Forgive this abominably stupid question, but is this the sort of thing that I should be looking for in the instruction book for the wireless router, or on some receipt somewhere, or within the laptop that's already hooked up, or on our server, or what?
All advice will be gratefully received, and one of these days I'll take a basic computer skills class and stop bugging y'all. :-)
Monday, August 01, 2005
Hey techies?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
The network key sounds like you have an encrypted wireless network. The key resides in the wireless router, where it is set. However you can connect to the router and configure it, you should be able to see what the network key. Encryption options may be WEP or WPA. Once you get that key (it will probably be in hexadecimal... as in using A-F and 0-9), you put it into the laptop when it asks and you should be able to communicate with the wireless router as you both will be encrypting and decrypting the packets that go through the airwaves.
Alternatively, just reconfigure the wireless router to not use encryption is you are not worried about it, but I think that all security minded folks would say that is a no-no.
Hopefully that will help... and if you need a pseudo techie to work out there with you, just fly me out there!
Post a Comment