WiFi password issue

Forum Forums Freeview HD FVP 4000T, 5000T WiFi password issue

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  • #18121
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    Hi all,

    We got an FVP 4000T delivered yesterday so I tried to connect it to our WiFi.

    After about 5 attempts I gave up and connected via a cable temporarily just to get the unit up and running, updated the firmware verified everything worked and then tried the WiFi again with no success.

    Eventually as an experiment I set up a hidden guest network on the router with a 10 character password of upper & lowercase letters & numbers using WPA2 just to see if I could connect to that.

    I connected first time & every subsequent time.

    This is not ideal, I work from home as a software developer so I would prefer not having a guest network at all, I have a nice long and complicated passphrase on my WiFi and several devices that connect to it with no issue.

    The only thing I can think of is that my router passphrase is too long for the 4000T, it’s 42 characters

    Or the special symbols in the passphrase are throwing the 4000t and not being passed to the router properly when it attempts to connect.

    The passphrase is 42 characters mixed upper & lowercase with numbers and also contains several “-” characters

    Has anyone else had this, is it a known issue, am I alone ?

    #71883
    Martin Liddle
    Participant

    esme – 1 hour ago  » 

    The only thing I can think of is that my router passphrase is too long for the 4000T, it’s 42 characters

    Or the special symbols in the passphrase are throwing the 4000t and not being passed to the router properly when it attempts to connect.

    The passphrase is 42 characters mixed upper & lowercase with numbers and also contains several “-” characters

    I don’t have an FVP-4000T so can’t comment specifically on that model. Certainly earlier Humax boxes have had limits on both passphrase length and passphrase character set that would have rendered your passphrase invalid. I think it would be helpful if you could experiment and see if it is the length or the character set that is is the issue.

    #71884
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    I found on a recent test that when my Netflix password contained a hyphen, the Humax would not log on to Netflix.

    I wondered if the Humax was sending, say, an em-dash or an en-dash, instead of a hyphen. I reported it to Humax.

    Do a test by changing the password to something with only characters and numbers, and then find out by trial and error which character(s) are causing the problem.

    Please let us know what you discover!

    #71885
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    Okidoki I’ll do some experiments, might not be for a day or two though

    Thanks for getting back to me

    #71886
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    OK managed to do some testing

    I set up a guest network using WPA2-PSK (AES) with a nice easy short password

    like “ABCD1234*0”

    I varied the password with several different symbols including “-” where the “*” is, didn’t try them all but I tried several

    The network connected every time so I decided the problem must be the length of the password

    I changed the network password to

    “ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ”

    Nice & simple, 52 characters long but as the limit is 63 characters the router handled it fine

    Tried adding this password to the Humax and failed

    Tried again while watching what characters were going in & found that the password field stopped accepting characters after 46 had been entered so I couldn’t enter a perfectly legal but long password

    Now the password for my main network is only 42 characters so it should have been OK but given the apparent limit on the password entry field I suspect there’s a smaller limit on passwords internally. I really don’t want to spend hours hunting down exactly how many would be accepted as this is Humax’s problem & should have been discovered in their testing

    The Humax should be accepting passwords up to 63 characters long.

    At a wild guess I’d say they’ve confused this with hexadecimal input, so with 2 hex digits per byte the internal limit on passwords is probably around 32 bytes, that’s just a guess though

    #71887
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    esme

    Thanks for the notes.

    PS – congratulations on using a nice long password on your WiFi 8)

    PS2 – Do you use a password manager? I use KeePass and I have about 500 passwords stored it. I don’t know any of my passwords or my usernames – it keep track of everything for me. I have it sybced across my desktop, laptop, tablet and phones and I would be lost without it.

    Like you, I get extremely frustrated when web sites etc. put limits on password length or limit the characters accepted. I created a password yesterday – it only accepted about six of the special characters :-(

    #71888
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    I’ve never had a problem with long passwords, I learned that lesson years ago doing Comp Sci at uni, some of the students would hack each others accounts, so you learned ways of remembering long obscure passwords or you found the program you were writing had a few extra lines that output messages saying your password was no good when you ran it, nothing malicious just enough to embarrass, especially if you handed it in before spotting the extras.

    Is this being passed back to Humax or should I contact them directly ?

    One other thing though, as the Humax is going to be in a secure location, your home usually, there’s not really any need to hide the password on input & it does make it easier to check what your typing, would it be possible to suggest that to them as well

    #71889
    Martin Liddle
    Participant

    esme – 2 hours ago  » 

    Is this being passed back to Humax or should I contact them directly ?

    One other thing though, as the Humax is going to be in a secure location, your home usually, there’s not really any need to hide the password on input & it does make it easier to check what your typing, would it be possible to suggest that to them as well

    Contacting Humax directly is the only way to be sure that they have the information. Whether they do anything about it is a completely different matter.

    #71890
    Anonymous
    Inactive
    #71891
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    okidoki – Sent, I’ll update with any response

    #71892
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    Response from Humax

    Quote:
    Thank you for contacting Humax.

    I’m sorry that you are having this issue with your Humax Box. I can see in that thread you have already confirmed it is possible to connect with a shorter password, and you also have a guest network setup. If you are security conscious you could consider also adding the FVP’s mac address as a security check for the guest network. I will pass on the concerns regarding maximum password length to our development team.

    Best Regards,

    Stephen

    Humax Customer Support

    I use MAC addresses as well but disable them if I’m adding a new device to the network. :-)

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