[ale] WRT54G2 wifi router troubles

[Charles Shapiro]

OK, so my wife's personal trainer bought a WRT54G2 router on the
advice ( I think) of her MCSE technical guru, who she thinks is a
Genius. She then tried to make it work in a closed wifi network with
her Dell Netbook. This should have been simple -- plug the router into
her DSL modem, plug her PC into the router, let DHCP do its magic, set
a WPA2 password, and off we go. Alas,she couldn't get the Netbook to
connect on the wifi side, although the PC connected directly to the
wireless router was able to get to the internet just fine.

So after getting a confused ( and confusing ) email, I rode to the
rescue, complete with N810 and Ubuntu 8.10 laptop.  We plugged
everything up and discovered that it was even as she said -- the Dell
netbook wouldn't authenticate, even after I double-checked the
password and put it into clear-text input mode to verify that it was
correct. More interesting, my N810 would authenticate and connect to
the internets just fine, but my laptop wouldn't authenticate either.
So I futzed around with the router in random fashion for a whiles,
going nowhere -- I tried changing to the authtype on the router to
WPA, changing the encryption from AES/TKIP to straight TKIP, et
cetera. No joy at all.

So finally,  suspecting that the authentication was in fact the
trouble, I simply disabled auth on the router completely to get to an
open network.  And of course, her netbook, my laptop, and my  N810
could all get on without authenticating just fine.  So now I knew it
had to be authentication, right?  So I re-enabled WPA2 with AES/TKIP
encryption, and found that all of my (and her) devices could now
authenticate properly and get on the wireless net with no troubles.
Huh. This is one to note for future reference.

So now her MCSE dude is telling her that she really wants to put her
DHCP modem in pass-through mode and do PPPOE through her wireless
router. She's managed to put her router into PPPOE mode, but I suspect
that she doesn't know where her PPPOE secret is and she isn't clear on
the relationship between her router and her DHCP modem.  I'm pretty
reluctant to help her out on this because the small speed increase
she'll see won't be worth the extra pain of configuration and the loss
of flexibility in not having a DMZ between the two firewalls.  It's a
SOHO setup though, so maybe she doesn't really need that flexibility.

I wrote an email to the other guy, but I'm assured that he won't
answer and probably won't even read it, seein' as how he's a
$100-an-hour system administrator and everything.

Did I do the Right Thing?

-- CHS