The Negatives

09:13 - Tuesday 23 December 2003 by THG Reporting Team
Source: Tom's Hardware – Keywords: wireless, security, corp, wscguard

The Negatives

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Although WSC's system worked well for the most part, I ran into a few quirks that I thought I should share:

The installer told me that it couldn't find any supported adapters, even though it was showing me the BuffaloTech adapter, which is listed as supported on WSC's website.

Things can get a little confusing on an XP-based system running Wireless Zero Config, since both Zero Config and the WSC Guard application pop-up notifications. I found that I could ignore the XP notifications and just bring up the WSC Guard Login screen and get successfully logged in most of the time. But occasionally, I had to use Zero Config to select the network to connect to, then perform my login.

A key weakness and potential source of confusion is that the WSC Guard application provides no in-progress user feedback. Once you enter your login info, the login screen goes away and you're left staring at the WSC Guard Status window, with no messages, spinning ball, or anything else to tell you what's going on. Since I'm not a patient guy, I found myself repeatedly hitting the Login as New... button when authentication didn't complete within five seconds or so...which happened frequently. The delay could be due to the fact that I have only a 128K ISDN Internet connection, but delays could be caused by other factors. At any rate, I feel that the application should let the user know what's going on.

There's also no logging available for debug or other purposes, other than the log in the Automated Fallback screen. So if things aren't working, you may have a difficult time finding out why.

There is no logout option, nor easy way to temporarily disable the service.


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