OpenWrt WEP client

Like every year, my trusty Fonera 1 running OpenWrt Kamizake repeats the nearest signal to my Hotel room. Until now, my lovely Sol Bahia had an open WiFi access, which was trivially configured in OpenWrt, but this year, they changed their access point to a Zyxel Prestige 650HW-33 (don’t ask) which is “secured” (yeah, right) with WEP. Why am I writing an article about this? because I tend to never use WEP and forget how to configure it on my router everytime. Also, that protocol is so widely not recommended, that there’s almost no documentations on how to set it up properly, but as a matter of fact there are so many hotels and people still using that unsecure protocol that it’s worth writing a reminder.

So here’s the relevant portion of my OpenWrt Kamikaze 7.0.9 /etc/config/wireless for a WEP client:

The tricks are:

• You can have more that one key declared, so you’ll have to give the index of the key to use.
• That key is to be declared as keyX, X being the index previously chosen
• The key can’t be written as a plain string, if the password is a string, you’ll have to hexdump it:

The /etc/config/network for that link is trivial:

There you go, hopefully I won’t forget it next time :)

Now to the beach.