Check this first for Mac-ABS-PC setup

Question

Anyone with wireless network setup problems.... one thing to check first, before configuring a Windows PC to connect to an Airport network. This is how it works for Snow ABS and OSX 10.3.8. I don't know if it's the same for Tiger.
Start with the Mac side.
Make sure your Airport network is on and working. Open the Airport Admin Utility, click Configure. Click Show all settings. Open the Access Control tab. Check to see if you have restricted access to specific Macs on your network.
If you have restricted access to specific machines, your Windows PC will not be able to connect to the network when you try and set up the connection from the PC side. It is easy to forget this little detail, especially if you set up your ABS network a while ago.
In Access Control, delete all networked machines listed (click-select a machine in the list and click the - button to the right of the list). Click the Update button at bottom of window, wait till A Admin Utility updates.
Next, click the Password padlock icon in the Admin Utility menu bar. Copy down the 13 digit hex key that is displayed.
Now you can switch to the PC, and follow instructions such as iFelix provides to get the PC to find and connect to the network.
Once the PC has connected successfully, open the (your network) Connection Status window, click on Support tab, and the Details button. You will see the physical address of the PC listed. Note it down.
As iFelix says, you can use this physical address in the Aiport Admin Utility. Go back to a networked Mac, open Aiport Admin > Configure > Show all settings > Access Control. Using the + button, add your Macs back into the list, and add the PC using the physical address you noted down. Click the Update button. Your network will restrict access to the listed machines.
I didn't have to disable either Mac or Windows firewalls during this procedure.
Hope this helps
Ken

Answer 1

Henry, seems to me cracking filters or WEP is a secondary security issue. Most of us just want to get our network to work, after which we may have the luxury of considering security issues.
On the ABS Access Control setting, I set this when I first got the ABS, and then forgot about it. Yes, stupid of me, and maybe it is useless. But, with something new like a network, many of us don't know what we're doing or how it works. We just try to do what seem the right things, cross our fingers and hope for the best.
It doesn't help when experts say things in ways too cryptic to understand.
For example, you say "...simply add the MAC address of the PC to this list right from the start..."
The vital piece of information you leave out is how we can get this MAC address for the PC before the connection to the ABS network is successfully established.
The sad fact is we don't know how to get the MAC address "right from the start". Or even what a MAC address is (as opposed to say a Mac address). I now suspect that the "MAC address" may be the same as the "physical address", but I'm not sure even now, and my network is working.
In my case, a setting in the Mac Airport Admin prevented the Windows PC from getting a successful connection, so Windows didn't reveal the physical address of the PC until I found what the problem was, and connected. Only then was the physical address of the PC revealed to me. At the end, not the start.
If there is some way to extract the physical address of the PC out of it before it gets a successful connection to an ABS, it might be useful if someone would reveal the secret. It's probably quite simple, but nothing I read told me how to do it (in words I could understand). Or even that I needed to.
Perhaps out of all this some of the step-by-step instructions can be added to (and some of the jargon clarified?), so that posts to this forum become fewer, and we'll have less hair-tearing.
Regards
Ken