Categories
Pet Peeves System Administration

Broadcom woes

The company laptop (Windows XP) of my wife came with the Broadcom software for controlling the Wifi settings.

I’ve already had so many troubles getting that box to talk WPA to my local WLAN at home (an OpenWrt Kamikaze running on an Alix box) that I switched back to WEP.

Last week I tried to get the Broadcom junk to talk WPA to the Linksys ADSL/WLAN CPE at my mother’s place. No go. Just once, for a few seconds it managed to get the TKIP key. Most of the time it failed to negotiate an AES key. Whatever.

I’m so glad I convinced her tech department to give us local admin rights. That way I finally just nuked that dysfunctional piece of sh*** and went back to the default Windows WLAN configuration tool.

That just worked.

Instantly. No hassle at all.