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My neighbor offered to share his high-speed internet signal.  It was 
set to WPA but he let me change it to 128-WEP.  Since his Apple Airport 
Express signal is so weak that it is 20% strength on our side porch in a 
direct line with his window closest to the router, he won't worry too 
much about someone cracking the WEP (they would need to stand right in 
front of his house to do it).  20% is still about 100 Kbyte/sec and I was 
able to do VOIP on an iBook.

Steven pointed out that Airo 340 does not do WEP, 350 does.  I have two 
340s and also some Orinoco cards (rebranded by manufacturers to things 
like MN-520, Linksys ver 2.5 and 3, and Dell Truemobile).

Orinoco silver cards do 64-bit, gold cards 128-bit WEP.  As of 2004 there 
were Apple and DOS firmware updates (use at your own risk) to add 128-bit 
capabilities.  A new company bought them out and now makes 'gold' cards 
with a different chip (B/G).

BL3 with kernel 2.2 works only with airo and some orinoco (wvlan driver).

Orinoco cards have a much shorter range than airo, but they are designed 
to take external antennas with MC size plug.  Pry off the cap first.
We find various sizes of antenna in dead routers and laptops.

On my Compaq Armada 4120 120MHz 256 color, which has nice sound and 
speakers and would make a good internet radio, get dev info failed for the 
airo 340 (though it did find the card), which works elsewhere.  (Opera 8 
also segfaults probably because it wants more colors, but links2 works). I 
will test it with an orinoco card.  I tried to use it to set up a D-Link 
Bridge with 128-bit WEP, which we could place inside the neighbor's house 
next to his Apple wireless-only router, to pick up the wireless signal and 
transmit a wired signal next door.  The wizard needs more javascript than 
links2 provides (for site survey).  I offered him a wireless B router with 
parallel port print server but he wants N and USB print server.

iwconfig eth0 key xxxxxxxxxxxxx  (or a hex equivalent)
Can this be specified in the pcmcia config file?

5 characters for 64-bit and 13 for 128-bit.  23 of the bits are for some 
other key, so they are really 40 bit and 104 bit and may be advertised 
that way.  WPA required only 12 chars - the neighbor kindly let me add 
one.  WPA wireless cards are all cardbus and I don't have that working yet 
with BL except for regular ethernet.  The drivers need to be compiled and 
that requires newer glibc, gcc....

Cisco provides an X11 GUI to configure with, or you can write to various 
subdirectories of /proc (assuming you have one that does WEP).  Proc also 
lists things like signal strength.

Sindi Keesan