As a computer admin you often encounter annoying curious problems, especially if you deal with different hardware & OS configurations. This week I managed to get a WPA-PSK secured WLAN connection to work on a 500 MHz - 64 Mb Ram Pentium III running Windows 98 SE. Since the machine does just support USB 1.0, I did not dare to try my luck with a USB WLAN stick and went for a PCI Card, the ASUS WL-138g v2, which is misleadingly advertised as supporting both WPA & Win98SE and is offered for a reasonable price.
Most surprisingly, there was no possibility to activate WPA after installing the card: A short electronic search in the PDF manual brought a sentence in the Glossary Section to my attention:
For earlier Windows Operating systems, a WPA capable supplicant is required such as Funk Software’s Odyssey Client.
(N.B. Earlier means earlier than Windows XP in this context.)
Please notice, that Funk Software’s Odyssey Client beside being a formidable application for all kind of encryptions is also rather pricey. While my customer satisfaction level was drowning more and more, I started some online research on how to get WPA to work with Windows 98 SE: Actually, Microsoft introduced WPA support for Windows XP with Service Pack 1 (SP1), but never ever for Windows 98. Some old forum posts suggested the use of WSC Guard from Wireless Security Corporation, a free WPA supplicant for Windows 98, but all the links to the company’s website were down. Indeed, they were bought already in June 2005 by McAfee and their WSC Guard was incorporated into McAfee’s Internet Security Suite that costs around 40€.
However, McAfee still allows to download a 30 days trial version and—here comes the clue—still allows to install the WSC Guard for free as long as one clicks the “Install only free software part” checkbox during installation.
So, thumbs up to McAfee, and thumbs down to Asus!
P.S.: You additionally have to install this Windows 98 SE hotfix to make WSC Guard work. Anyway the installer will check this on his own and, as the case arises, remind you.
7 responses so far ↓
1 Joe // Jul 4, 2008 at 10:25 am
Hi,
I downloaded the McAfee Internet Security Suite 30-day trial, and it forced me to use some sort of McAfee Download Manager. Anyway, it gave me a bunch of checkboxes for stuff to install, but WSC Guard was not an option. There was no “install only free software part” option.
I can’t find WSC Guard anywhere. Help!
2 admin // Jul 4, 2008 at 10:34 am
Dear Joe,
I followed the instructions on this german webpage:
http://www.netzwerktotal.de/wpawindows98me2000.htm
There you’ll also find a working link to the Version 4.1 of the McAfee Wireless Security Installer that did the job for me.
Greetings,
Chris
3 Joe // Jul 7, 2008 at 7:08 am
Thanks Chris! Just curious, have you tried WSC Guard on Windows 2000 or XP? I did a test install on an XP machine, and saw a couple issues with logging in as a non-admin user. It will always show a Welcome dialog box when a non-admin user logs in, even if you check the “don’t show this again” checkbox, so that’s kinda annoying. (It never shows that dialog box if you log in as an admin.) I also noticed that if you close the system tray app and try to run it again, it will start but remain unresponsive until you log out and log in again.
4 admin // Jul 7, 2008 at 8:38 am
I never tried it on 2000 or XP, but I experienced the same issues you describe on the Win 98 machine: Actually, I thought them to be related to the rather “old” Win 98 installation. Nevertheless, it seems to be an WSC Guard related problem: Anyway, it works for me.
5 Joe // Jul 8, 2008 at 8:12 am
Did you ever encounter any errors on 98? I just installed it on a 98 machine, and WSC Guard keeps crashing. WSCNETMGRSVC is causing an invalid page fault in WSCNETLIB.DLL and MSVCRT.DLL.
6 mike // Dec 5, 2008 at 6:09 am
Thanks (Besten dank) to our German friends. As I dont speak German I used Google’s translation tools. They say to “put a tick below” but dont say the tick box is something that I didn’t expect, something like “Disable Security” -sorry didn’t write it down. There was a bit more to it that maybe other people cottoned on to faster than me. I had to enter some TCP/IP settings via Network properties and was surprised to find that the TCP/IP was linked to “WScNetDr Miniport” and a “WScNetDr Protocol” linked to the wireless card. Anyway I set the TCP/IP that was linked to to the WScNetDr Miniport and it worked (so far anyway).
7 martin // Feb 6, 2009 at 5:51 pm
hello, i have installed the mcfee! but in cant finish it, it says that the principal file . cab is bad..
any help?
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