error message?

[danawilliams]

i tried to enable my wireless connection on my laptop,and it said to enter a net work key.So I looked in my keep files and i found my network settings including the network key.It was very long and consisted of #s and letters. I tried to enter it and i got this message."the network password needs to be40 bits or 104 bits depending on your network configuration.This can be entered as 5 or 13 ascii characters or 10 or 36 hexadecimal characters" What does this mean?

 

[xenogen]

hexadecimal characters are 0-9 and A-F, ascii is pretty much everything else, ive never really looked into it but i would assume that if the letters in your network key are only A-F then its hexa, else ascii, the characters thing is straight forward, has to be 5 or 13 or 10 or 36, cant be anything in between, if its your network you should just chaaange the network key to something else on your router, otherwise, try double chcking you network key to to see if you typed it right, seems like you missed a character, also make sure you use the right case, i think A-F might be hex while a-f is ascii

 

[JohnWill]

Actually, the WEP lengths are:

64 bit passphrase = 5 char
64 bit hex key = 10 char
128 bit passphrase = 13 char
128 bit hex key = 26 char

 

[xenogen]

yer i was wondering about the 104bit thing, thought it might have been an american convention or something, guess not

 

[JohnWill]

Well, the reason that you have 104 bits and not 128 is because there are 24 bits of header information that is not part of the actual key. Same reason that the 64 bit key is only 40 bits long.