Chris Erwin

When I told the teacher in charge of one of the laptop carts at the high school that I’d be taking 3 of his laptops and his access point because “the computers are set to connect to the access point, but they just won’t” he asked if I was going to put them in therapy.  I confirmed that I’d be setting them up in a circle for group therapy so we could work through their aversion to connecting the the WAP.  I was more correct in this than I had first thought.

Turns out there’s an extra check box in Vista’s wireless network profiles that says “Connect even if the network is not broadcasting” and sure enough our WAPs don’t broadcast their SSIDs.  Simple enough fix, and if you’ve found this via googling about why your Vista laptop won’t reconnect to your wireless network, you’re done.  I however have 120 laptops that have this setting.  Hmm.

For a simpler fix we now turn our attention to the Proxim AP-4000M, of which I have 9 to deal with.  Simple enough, but they don’t have the SSID broadcast setting in their web interface.  After about 20 minutes of perusing the manual, I found the telnet commands I needed.  I fired up putty and in no time had all 120 laptops working.  “show wif” lists your wireless profiles.  make note of the numbers and type “set wif # closedsys disable” for each number.  “reboot 0″ or power-cycle the access point.

“But Chris!” you say, “Isn’t broadcasting your SSID a bad idea?”  Well, you see we use WEP encryption with MAC filtering, which is about as secure as a 1-digit bike lock to someone who knows what they’re doing, not to mention the whole system is being replaced by a building-wide Cisco setup soon enough.  Not broadcasting your SSID is security through obscurity.  Besides, how else can you show off your clever network name?  Our home network is currently SPACEBALLS: The Router.