Alan's Tips: Connecting a Mac to a non-Airport wireless router

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I am trying to connect D-Link to an Airport-carded Mac --with no luck---Is there something I am supposesd to change as far as encryptions? I cannot find any instructions--as you said Apple instructs @ their Base station, and nothing else.

I see the router recognized, and the airport card is on, but I cannot connect ??

I assume you're using encryption on the router. The undocumented trick for allowing Macs to connect is that you need to enter the long hexadecimal encryption key on the Mac (the long collection of traditional digitals 0-9 along with letters a-f)-- not the short, human-readable phrase that you initially used to create the encryption key for the router. And you need to precede the encryption key (when you enter it on your Mac) with a '$' character -- which is the code that says that what's following is a hexadecimal number.

When you do that, your Mac ought to be able to connect.

Apr 24 2002

Alan Zisman is a Vancouver educator, writer, and computer specialist. He can be reached at E-mail Alan