Yesterday, one of my colleagues asked me to help her setup their home network. The have a desktop (Windows XP), a Toshiba laptop (Windows Vista Basic), PLDT DSL, and Linksys wrt54g.

I was able to setup the router to dial the DSL modem (Alcatel modem) via PPPoE. Setup of the wired connection (for the desktop) was a breeze. Was able to surf the internet in seconds.

Setup of the wireless (for the router side) is not problem. But when I got to the laptop (running Vista Basic), It wasn’t detecting the wireless signal.

I am not familiar in setting up wireless connection for Vista. My first encounter with Vista wi-fi setup was with my brother-in-law’s Acer laptop (also Vista Basic). I find it very hard to configure (that was in our home network where in I am no having problem connecting a Latitude D620 running on Windows XP wirelessly) and whenever I got a connection, when I restart the Vista laptop, it can’t pick up my home wi-fi anymore, so I have to manually configure that again.

My wireless setup was this. Router’s SSID is hidden, WPA2 Personal, AES.

On the acer laptop, I was able to connect by disabling the proxy settings on IE and Firefox (maybe set by the seminary for their wifi). But still, when restarted, connection won’t come back.

On the toshiba laptop, it was totally head-busting. Even after configuring the wireless signal manually, it won’t connect. I can’t detect the wireless signal for the first 30 minutes. It detected it after I manually configured it (un named network protected). However, it still shows that it is disconnected. It was able to detect the wireless signal of a nearby net cafe (SSID not hidden) as soon as the laptop is turned on, but as for the Linksys router, it won’t.

I tried changing broadcast channel but still no go. Went to unprotected network but still no go. I discovered that the laptop was set to a static IP. I changed it to automatically acquire IP and I thought that would solve the problem. But still, can’t connect. I tried restarting everything but still no go.

I was about to go to online chat with Linksys when I tried to enable the broadcast of the router’s SSID. I restarted everything (modem, router, laptop, desktop). And boom, the Vista was able to detect the Linsys router immediately. It was able to connect to the router and the internet after entering the passkey.

I restarted everything again and it is working fine now.

So, I did a research. this site brought me some intriguing answer. It says that hidden SSID is a bad wireless security measure (against the common knowledge that hiding your SSID will add security to your wi-fi network). And it also says that I should enable “Connect even if the network is not broadcasting” option on the wireless network setup so I can connect to a hidden SSID (which I thought it was refering to connecting even if the router is not broadcasting “wi-fi signal” not the SSID).

The author is a tech from MS itself. And there were actual research that hiding SSID for security was a myth. And it is actually a violation of 802.11i specifications and guidelines when you hide your access point’s SSID. As for my part.

I also thought about that (hiding SSID a security myth). But I don’t know why I still applied that to the networks I setup. I have never encountered problems with that before (XP, Ubuntu) only on Vista. Well, maybe, I’ll change the way I wireless network now. I’ll let the router/access point broadcast its SSID to avoid problems, breaking standards and stop believing in myhts .

“The old axiom remains true: security by obscurity is no security at all”