There are a variety of reasons why someone will eventually need to change their WEP key. In general, it’s good practice to do this every few months anyway, especially if you’ve already got a small network. This article will help explain WEP keys and how to set them up for your home wireless network. This article assumes you are using Windows, although the process is mostly the same regardless of your operating system.
Wireless Encryption Privacy (WEP) is a standardized encryption protocol used in most home networks. It comes in different types depending on the level of encryption, such as 64-bit or 128-bit. The 128-bit encryption is more secure, though involves a much more difficult passphrase. You should use 128-bit encryption if your hardware can support it. In general, you should always use the best encryption your hardware can support, but your limited by the features of the most primitive computer in your network. If your router and all of your adapters can support it, use the better WPA or WPA2 encryption instead of WEP.
WEP encryption is used to protect 108.11 networks, the kind used in most home wireless network routers. Don’t let these numbers intimidate you — it’s not necessary to understand them precisely, only to recognize and be familiar with them. The point is that WEP protects your router by encrypting the signals that come from your router.
Your router is the heart of your home wireless network. It’s the device receiving the Internet signal, or otherwise acting as the heart of the network, and broadcasting out to all the other computers that pick up the signal with antennas. If you don’t have any encryption, then anyone can receive and transmit these signals across the network, possibly getting into your computers and accessing your router resources. They can even go so far as to encrypt your router, denying your access to it completely until you manually reset it.
For all of these reasons and more, it’s important to setup WEP on your networks. Not too long ago, routers used to be sold with default settings that left it unencrypted and easily vulnerable to others. Fortunately, most routers come with WEP enabled by default, and you’ll usually be setting up a WEP passphrase as part of setting up the router.
The passphrase is a hexadecimal code consisting of numbers and 0-9 and letters A-F only. It’s not typically a "password" in the typical sense but can look something like this: 4fda38cd49. Write down your passphrase and keep it somewhere safe! It’s very difficult to access a WEP passphrase from the computer, and its not recommended trying — if you lose the passphrase you may have to setup a new one next time you need to adjust your network, such as adding another computer.
Fortunately, that’s not a terribly difficult process but it’s not intuitive either — you really have to be told how. Again, fortunately, most router manufacturers have wizened up on this and have very detailed, illustrated step-by-step instructions on how to do this. The exact process varies from router to router, based on the manufacturer and model. Typically, it involves you going into your Internet browser (such as Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox) and typing in an IP address. (Don’t panic.) The IP address to type in looks like this: 192.168.1.1, and usually those will be the exact numbers you need.
Typing in this address will allow you to access the control area of your router through your Internet browser. However, if your router was setup properly, you’ll have to enter the name and password you chose when you setup the router. Hopefully, you remember this or saved this. If you didn’t setup the router, or you didn’t select a password, then the router will have a default username and password. Again, this is different depending on your manufacturer and model, and can usually be found in your manual. I would try typing "admin" for the login name (without the quotes) and the same thing for the password, when in doubt. That usually works for many default routers, although manufacturers have started getting better about requiring users to setup new login names and passwords when setting up the router.
If you enter the login name and password correctly, you’ll be in the control area of the router. There will usually be an "Encryption" or "Security" tab that you’ll have to click on and it is from there that you will have the option to change the passphrase or generate a random one. Remember to save the changes by clicking "save" before leaving to a different page. Write down the passphrase — you’re going to need it soon. Make sure the "Use WEP encryption" box is checked if there is one. Also, if you notice the network name on the front page, be sure to write that down, too. (You can change it if you want to — but keep in mind others can see the network name so don’t call it Bob’s Network or something personal like that.)
Once you’ve changed the WEP passphrase in the router, the signals it is sending are encrypted. That means that (hopefully) no one can understand the signals its sending out, not even the other computers in your network! To setup the network now, you’ll have to go to each computer you want in your network and set them up with the WEP passphrase so that they can understand the router’s signals. Once everyone has the same WEP passphrase, they can all talk to each other. Without that, it’s like they’re all speaking different languages.
The process for setting up the WEP passphrase on the other computers is a little bit different. Those computers don’t have routers, they have network adapters (or receivers). You’re not generating a new WEP passphrase, you’re instructing them on which passphrase to use to join the router’s network.
If everything’s working up to this point, you should be noticing that the other computers can detect the wireless network from the router. You should see the wireless network name. If multiple networks are within range you may have to choose which network to connect to. All computers should be on connected to the same network. However, you’re likely also getting "Limited Connectivity" errors and are unable to access the Internet or do other fun network stuff. That’s because these adapters need the passphrase to work with the router
Go through your start menu and see if you have a wireless network utility installed for your adapter. (It will usually have the brand of the adapter in it.) You can use windows to manage the wireless network, but its usually better to use the adapters’ own software if its available. From here there should be a place to enter the WEP passphrase.
Once all the computers have the same passphrase as the router, you’re Limited Connectivity problems should be done. Open up your Internet browser and see if you can access the network. Hopefully, everything should be working now. This article has outlined the basics of setting up your WEP, but there are a lot of other aspects to networking and some more troubleshooting may be involved in other aspects. It’s not hard to setup your network, but as you can see, it does take quite a few steps to go through. Focus on your setting up your encryption in the router, and getting all the other computers using the same passphrase. I’d say about half of home networking problems can be solved by properly setting up or changing the encryption passphrases. But if the network still isn’t working, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve done something wrong with the encryption — there’s a lot of other components to setting up your home network such as wiring, firewalls, conflicts, compatibility, etc.
