I've been working on reconfiguring my home office network, moving some of my machines and equipment around and taking a few more devices wireless. As part of this, I decided to go ahead and move my XBox 360 onto my wireless network. Should be easy right? Just pick up a handy dandy XBox 360 wireless adapter, plug the thing into the nifty little slot on the back of the box and we're off, right? Should've known life's never that easy . . .

Now don't get me wrong, I fully accept that my network is a little convoluted because of work requirements and over zealous security. However, since both of the laptops on the network could connect to my wireless Access Point, I at least expected the XBox to be able to see the network. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case . . . I fiddled with every little setting I could think of, but nothing. So, I unplugged my Cisco Pix 501, since I've had issues with it in the past being a little too strict for some Live connections and plugged in the old Netgear router I used to use. Voila! Instant connection. So, now I'm thinking it's the Pix's fault, but I can't ditch that 'cause it's my lifeline to my office VPN for doing all that nifty server stuff (instead of going to the office in the middle of the night). What's a poor guy to do?

Not to be deterred, I continued my "differential diagnosis" (Sorry, watching too much House :)) - I started looking at every possible difference between to the AP and the Netgear wireless router configuration. That's when I noticed that my AP was running WPA2 and my Netgear was only running WPA. Now, the networking blade in the Dashboard has an option for WPA2, so I never thought anything of it. However, when I switched the AP to plain old WPA, even behind the poor, unjustly accused PIX, everything worked out just fine.

So, what's the moral of our story? Well, 1) never threaten to smash defenseless network equipment (especially when its company owned) before doing all your research. And, 2) read the fine print. Turns out that there's a note on the Wireless adapter support page almost at the very bottom that specifically mentions the 360's current lack of WPA2 support. Just wish I would have see that first!