Problem
Many customers are complaining that WPA does not work on a WDS enabled Wireless network with 2 or more AP’s.
Reason
There is no solution to this problem as this is a technological limitation for the following reason…
WDS forms part of the 802.11 specification. WPA is a draft version for the 802.11i specification and has been superseded by WPA2 which is the final specification for 802.11i wireless standard. Wireless Distribution System (WDS) can only work with static keys between bridges or repeaters on both sides of the WDS link with Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP). Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) does note use static encryption keys but uses a dynamic 4-way key handshake based on either a Preshared Secret Key (WPA-PSK) or a master key delivered via 802.1X radius server.
Due to this, WDS is incompatible with WPA on most of the current routers.
The 802.11i specification has allowed for WDS to work with WPA2.
Most products without support for WPA2 will not work.
Security work-around solution
To ensure security on the network, we recommend that 128bit WEP encryption be used. Most AP’s support more than 128Bit encryption, but with standard Windows XP Service Pack 2 software, only 128Bit encryption is supported.
For 152Bit encryption third party software will need to be used instead of the Windows XP Zero Config utility.
Some of these include the Gigabyte Client Utility which has the option enabled when used with a 152Bit WLAN Card. |
