Nov 18 2009
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How to make an Intel wireless card connect to an Apple Airport base station in WPA2 mode
With some notebooks (including a Lenovo Thinkpad and a recent Gateway model) we’ve had problems getting Wi-Fi connected to our Airport Extreme base station.
In the past, we enabled both WPA and WPA2 on our base station and then manually set the laptops to use TKIP (WPA) mode (previous post describing how to do this). This worked until we decided to turn off WPA mode, supporting only WPA2, due to newly-discovered vulnerabilities in WPA/TKIP.
Once again, our notebooks with Intel 4965AGN and Intel 5100AGN wireless cards were unable to connect.
Then one of my awesome coworkers, Matt, discovered a setting that fixes everything: turn on an option called “FIPS compliance.” Here’s what to do:
- Open Network and Sharing Center (NSC).
- From the list at the left-hand side of NSC, choose Manage wireless networks.
- Right-click on your network and choose Properties. (If your network is not in the list yet, you will have to click on “Add” and enter your network information and password before continuing.)
- On the Security tab, set Security Type to WPA2-Personal and Encryption Type to AES.
- Still on the Security tab, click the Advanced Settings button.
- Check the box that says Enable Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) compliance for this network.
- Click OK several times to close the dialog boxes.
