Nintendo Wifi headaches
Rassa frassa @#$^%!&…
Tommy asked me to set up the Wifi connection on his new Nintendo DS Lite so that he could play Animal Crossing over the net using our home Wifi network.
No problem — a year or two ago I’d helped set Chris up so he could play Mario Kart over IP on his DS. So I opened the DS Lite setup screen and tapped in our WEP key — and got an error message. Huh. I tried it again, with the same result. After several careful tries, I ruled out data entry errors and knew I had to do some research. Why wasn’t it working now, when it worked fine a year ago? When I found out, the answer was truly annoying.
It turns out that the DS and the DS Lite need to use Wifi-B.
Back when I set up Chris’s DS, our wireless access was via a Wifi-B access point. I handed Chris our WEP key on a Post-It note, he tapped it in, and it worked. But since then, I’d upgraded to a Wifi-G router… and once we’d moved to new computers that all used Wifi-G, I’d switched the router from “mixed B/G” mode to “G-only” mode to boost performance. I hadn’t heard any complaints from Chris, but when I asked him I found out he hadn’t played Mario Kart over IP in months, not since prior to the switch, so he wouldn’t have noticed any problems.
So I switched the router back to “mixed B/G” mode, which fixed the problem. The DS Lite was able to connect, no other issues. Except the whole reason I went to “G-only” was that it’s supposed to be faster than “mixed B/G”. But if I want to support DS Wifi connectivity then I have to support Wifi-B alongside Wifi-G, and put up with the lower transfer rate that goes with doing so.
So what’s gonna happen when I want to upgrade my router to Wifi-N?
And one other thing. The DS supports WEP — but not WPA. So not only am I stuck with supporting a slower Wifi-B mode, I’m also stuck with a not-so-secure encryption scheme. Oh joy.
I wonder if I could dust off my old access point, plug it into the router, and use it solely to connect to the DS via Wifi-B and WEP? Would that allow me to have the router run in “G-only” mode, using WPA?
March 19th, 2007 at 7:49 am
Just remember that putting a WEP access point on your network pretty much means that WEP is the weakest link in your security chain. There’s no point having WPA on one access point and WEP on another.
If you really wanted to be paranoid, you could add another firewall to the mix and firewall off your WPE AP from your WPA AP.
March 19th, 2007 at 8:28 am
Yah, I thought about that. I was thinking that maybe I could tighten it up a bit by setting the WEP AP to only talk to the MAC addresses of Tommy’s and Chris’s DSes. What a hassle.