Asus WL-167g on OS X 10.3

Summary: Only WPA with TKIP works, not WPA2 with AES

I have several iMac G3's and I have only one Airport card, so I have acquired an Asus WL-167G USB adapter which I now needed to work on one of the machines without an Airport card. The 54 Mbps doesn't matter much as the USB port is 1.1 only, but it is nice anyway as my ADSL provides only 200 kb/s.

This had worked before, but I had removed the drivers when setting up the airport card on this machine, so it should just be a matter of reinstalling the driver and plugging the adapter in. Unfortunately it didn't quite go that easy.

My wireless access point is an Apple Airport Express (which I bought solely for the Airtunes facility) and this combination has worked flawlessly earlier, but not anymore. As a Dell could connect effortless I strongly suspected driver problems., as my previous adventures with this indicated that it HAD to be exactly right to work.

Unfortunately both the latest driver from the Asus website, as well as the driver on the cd that came with the adapter failed utterly despite several reboots. The adapter was found, the very ugly interface window came up, the network preference pane showed the adapter but it assigned itself an IP-adress instead of getting one from DHCP.

After a lot of headscratching I noticed that the statistics pane showed that NO frames were received at all. This reminded me that I had changed some settings in the Airport Express some months back, so it ran both WPA and WPA2, and the software suggested WPA2 with AES as the authentication mechanism. Hmm, changing this to WPA with TKIP gave packets back AND a DHCP address.

Adding the RT2500Replug hack made this work also after a reboot.

Now it works well again, and hiding the status window and giving it a nicer icon helps a lot on the driver icon (why couldn't they just mimic the airport stuff instead, sigh).