WPA taking forever to authenticate.

[ghostchamber]

A few months back I purchased a new router for home use, the D-Link DIR-655. My old router pretty much kicked the bucket, and I wanted something halfway decent that wasn't a pain in the ass to maintain. Some research on Newegg and on here led me to this router.

It's got a lot of nice features, but there is one issue I was having that I wasn't able to resolve: WPA is taking forever to authenticate. The Network and Sharing Center is basically stuck on "Identifying" with local access only. My wife has a Vista Home Premium Acer laptop, and if she doesn't have internet access when the computer boots up, I get to hear about it. Unfortunately, the problem wasn't black and white--sometimes it would happen, sometimes it wouldn't.

One of my first troubleshooting steps was to give her a static IP address. This sort of worked, although she was still intermittently having trouble connecting. Plus, this wasn't the sort of resolution I wanted to stick with because she occasionally bring her laptop to work.

I tried using DHCP with a static IP address as an alternate, but it didn't work. Even if it did, it would probably still take forever to actually receive the static address. Another attempt was giving her a DHCP reservation, which still did not fix the problem. I tried using no security, and it connected very quick. So I tried WEP, and it was very fast. So, I'm currently using WEP and MAC filtering. Not ideal, but it should keep people out. The way I figure it, anyone who knows how to break through wouldn't have too much interest in my network anyway.

However, I'd prefer to have WPA running. Anyone have any ideas? I've done some searching and having come up with much. One thing I did find was putting in a registry key for a broadcast flag setting in Vista, which didn't make a difference.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[archivalbackup]

MAC address filtering is not a form of security. It takes one command line to switch your MAC address on a *nix OS, and only one more to find the address of a valid connected user to clone.

Try a shorter WPA key, or put the computer in standby/hibernate instead of shutting it down which should allow it to resume much more quickly.

Some computers just take a lot longer to get around to the wireless authentication due to the number of startup programs that are trying to run.

 

[FibreChanMan]

Also make sure the latest drivers for the NIC and Firmware for the router are installed. Those are quick to take care of, and are probably the first things that support will want done if you end up calling them (either for the laptop or router).

 

[ghostchamber]

How is MAC filtering not a form of security? It's designed to keep users off your network. I know it's insanely easy to crack, but that doesn't mean it isn't a form of security.

The WPA key I used was only 11 digits long. And as far as my wife's laptop goes, she was putting it into sleep mode. She rarely shuts it off and only restarts when necessary. It was when returning from sleep that it would take forever.

And I already made sure I was on the latest router firmware, and she has the most current driver for her wireless adapter.