3Com 3CRWDR200A-75, 3CRWDR200B-75, WL-553 manual Profile Support for NICs

54CHAPTER 5: ROUTER CONFIGURATION

Profile Support for NICs

You may save your wireless settings here by clicking Save Profile. Please choose Save to Disk option when a dialog box opens. Thus, you may save your wireless settings to an external file and later on use this file to import the settings with supported 3Com Wireless Network Cards.

Encryption When setting up wireless networks, it is important to remember that with encryption disabled, anyone with a Wireless PC can eavesdrop on your network. 3Com recommends that you get the network working with encryption disabled first and then enable it as the last step. This will simplify setting up your network.

The Router supports the following types of encryption:

■WPA/WPA2/Mixed WPA WPA2 — Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) is a subset of the IEEE 802.11i standard. Both WPA and WPA2 use Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP), Message Integrity Check (MIC) and IEEE 802.11x. In addition to TKIP, WPA2 also uses Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). The mixed mode will let you choose the encryption mechanism interchangeably with either TKIP or AES.

■WEP — Wireless Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is a 64 bit or 128 bit encryption method with user configurable fixed keys.

■WPA+Radius/WPA2+Radius/Mixed WPA WPA2 +Radius features using of a RADIUS server with the pre-shared key authentication method. (This should only be used when a RADIUS server is connected to the Router).

WPA and WPA2 provides a higher level of security, provided by its longer key and dynamic changes made to the key over time. 3Com recommends that you use WPA with any clients which support it.

If you enable encryption on the Router, you must reconfigure your wireless PCs to use exactly the same Encryption Type and Keys otherwise the devices will not understand each other.

The encryption methods used by the Router secure data transmitted through wireless communications between the Router and its wireless clients. Enabling encryption has no security effect on data transmitted through wired (Ethernet) connections or through your connections to the Internet.