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It has been a few weeks since I installed the Netgear WGPS606 wireless printserver on our home network. It has been working great, and I have no complaints to speak of. This is significant considering that we run a pretty diverse network - one Fedora Core 5 machine, two Macs, and a Windows XP system.

I recently installed the OpenWRT firmware on our Linksys WRT54GS wireless access point (AP). The Netgear WGPS606 connects to the AP in order to interact with the other systems on our network. The stock Linksys firmware doesn't make much of a distinction between WPA and WPA2 when accessed through the adminstration interface. However, the OpenWRT admin interface does make a clear distinction between the two, including the encryption algorithms they use. According to the WPA and WPA2 specifications, their primary differrence is that WPA2 uses the more cryptographically-robust (and computationally-expensive) AES algorithm used by the U.S. government, while WPA uses a relatively weak TKIP/RC4 algorithm that is much faster (hence it runs well on cheap hardware, like the WGPS606). I don't mean to knock RC4, as it is perfectly acceptable for my home network, though AES is the current standard for high-grade encryption. So, I'd rather use WPA2 if given the choice.

I tried using just WPA2 with AES on the AP but was unable to get the Netgear WGPS606 to join the network. Only when I enabled WPA with TKIP/RC4 did the WGPS606 join.

My conclusion is that the Netgear WGPS606 supports WPA with the TKIP/RC4 encryption algorithm, but does not support the newer and more robust WPA2 standard. Hopefully this can be remedied by a firmware upgrade for the WGPS606 in the near future.