Wireless troubles insight tidbit

[ken_cinder]

Ran into some troubles lately I thought I'd share some insight on, since Googling just led me to a plethora of "moron" posts all over the internet with suggestions that made zero sense. Mind you my solution (and the cause of the problem) is rather odd in itself.

 

Was having trouble loading a few specific websites on my laptop, or any wireless device for that matter. I went through firmware changes on the router, resetting to defaults.........you name it, I tried it.

 

Finally found that these sites work PERFECT with a wired connection, thus giving up the jig that it was a wireless problem. The question was "Why in the hell would they worked wired but not wireless?", and after a good hour of playing with settings, including MTU and fragmentation values, I had a "DING!" go off in my head.

 

I had not too long ago altered my setup in the house. I put my cable modem downstairs in the living room with 1 wireless router, and my other router upstairs in my office as a repeater bridge for everything in there. What I did when setting them up, caused this chaos.

 

I went from using TKIP encryption to using AES for some reason. I switched the encryption on everything back to TKIP, low and behold no more problems.

 

I had switched to AES because so many insightful posts all over the internet state that AES has lower overhead AND is more secure than TKIP. After other testing, I've found this to actually be nothing but a load of bull$hit too BTW.

 

So just incase you ever run into wierd happenings with your wireless that works fine if you connect wired to the very same router, look to your wireless encryption as the possible culprit.