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Using WEP encryption Vigor Wireless LAN Routers

WEP (Wireless Encryption Protocol) is an method of data encryption for wireless clients, which makes the sending of your data over the wireless interface more secure. By default, WEP is turned off on the router.

Firstly, assuming you will use 128bit encryption (more secure than 64 bit) you need to select a 26 hex character encryption key (digits 01234567890ABCDEF). This should be kept secret and is used as the seed for the WEP encryption process. It is sometimes useful to use Windows notepad to note it down so that you can then copy&paste it into the router's configuration and then the client's wireless setup. In this example, we have used A-Z instead of a proper hex key :

Firstly, go into the router's configuration screen. Do this from a wired PC ideally, in case you lock yourself out of the wireless interface (don't panic; it's retreivable!). In the Wireless LAN general setup, give the router a name (SSID); this is useful to identify the router but you can leave it at 'default' if you like. Later, you might want to enable SSID stealthing to make it harder to scan for the SSID. In our example, we will call the SSID 'v2600gi' :

Click OK to save the settings and then go to the WEP setup menu. You now need to enter your chosen WEP key into the router's configuration. As we are using 128 bit WEP, you must prefix the key with 0x (zero x) to indicate to the router that it's a 26 character hex key :

Additionally, you can use the Vigor's Access Control facility to lock the wireless interface to specific client adaptors by their hardware MAC address (see elsewhere in the FAQ).

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