For months, I’ve been harboring a secret shame: my wifi network was insecure. Sure, there was the token not broadcasting the SSID, but any old miscreant could have connected to my network, sniffed the traffic, even launched a man-in-the-middle attack.

I tried a couple of times to set up WPA, but, amidst the thousand different conflicting bits of advice I found hither and yon on the web, I never got it to work. Finally, this weekend, I butted my head against the problem until it broke. The most important tips were here and here — I built the latest versions of ndiswrapper and wpa_supplicant and managed to configure them.

One pleasant surprise - though my wireless card/B0001D3K3A is advertised as supporting just WPA, the release notes for the latest driver say:

Added four wireless security methods: WPA-Personal, PS2 (WPA2-Personal), WPA-Enterprise, and RAIUDS [sic] to the Wireless Network Monitor for Windows 2000 and XP.

And, sure enough, even running within ndiswrapper, I got WPA2 to work.

Tune in for further exciting adventures in network administration, as I try to get OpenVPN running on my wifi router.