Together we'll break these chains of Cat5

Couple of nights ago, I was struggling to get my swanky new Compex NP16A wireless router set up for wireless use. Enabled WEP, that worked fine. But for some reason I couldn't get the Pseudo-VLAN feature to work.

I'd pick Group mode Pseudo-VLAN, enable WEP, then reboot the router. And my laptop would connect fine to the AP, but time out trying to obtain an IP address via DHCP. Strangely enough, when I disabled the VLAN feature, DHCP issued the IP address just fine.

And the WEP key for the VLAN group very curiously remained at '00000000000000000000000000' no matter how I hammered the Add or Delete buttons sitting below the form.

Was getting really frustrated, until I noticed that the right-side scrollbar indicated that there was more to the page. So I scrolled down a little, and sure enough, that revealed the innocent-looking button to Save WEP keys for the VLAN group.

In the immortal words of Charlie Brown: "Auuugh!"

After that, VLAN+WEP worked like a charm. No wonder I couldn't find documentation on my ordeal. I'd been suffering from mud-in-brains syndrome.