I finally upgraded to Panther (Apple MacOS 10.3) on my 500 mHz iBook, and aside from the disappointment of not getting the funky Quantel-esque graphic show in Fast User Switching, all seemed well.
That was until I turned WEP encryption back on on my WiFi router – an Alcatel SpeedTouch 570. Now my iBook lost its WiFi settings every time it went to sleep, which was deeply tedious. Having to type in a random 128 bit hex WEP key is tedious. And frustrating, as the Internet Connect panel won’t allow you to cut and paste hex keys.
My router does not broadcast its SSID by default, which seems to be part of the problem. Panther, it appears, likes its SSIDs sent in the clear for all to see. There’s some debate about whether this is a security risk or not – apparently it’s quite easy to gather non-broadcast SSIDs and even 128-bit WEP encryption can be broken relatively easily, but I figure that some basic precautions are a good idea to deter casual snoopers.
Anyhoo, it looks like good old MacIntouch has the answer – ignore Internet Connect, ignore the Airport control icon in the menu bar – go straight to System Preferences > Network, highlight ‘Airport’ and press the ‘Configure’ button. Under ‘By default join…’ enter your SSID and password – as I was using 128bit hex, I typed a dollar sign in before the password (which I was allowed to paste!) and orf we jolly well go.
Well so far, so good. It’s survived a few quick snoozes… but this is a pretty shoddy bit of user-interface design from Apple. Why do they seem to have three different places you can enter a WEP password? In fact there are four if you count keychains, which I didn’t even look into. And the password only seems to stick if you enter it in one of them (System Preferences > Network > Airport > Configure), which just plain daft. C’mon, Apple, I thought you were all about making technology easy to use?!