Windows XP, Vista, Starter 7, Trouble Connecting to wireless networks

Because I am often working with wireless networks I have discovered that Windows XP, Vista, and Starter 7 (Often found on netbooks.) will not connect to WEP wireless networks using an ascii (plain text) passkey.

I have found that the culprit is because the Windows OS refuses to encrpyt the passkey from ascii to hexadecimal format when trying to connect. The solution/workaround is to manually enter the passkey in hexadecimal format when setting up the connection.

I am unsure as to whether this also affects older versions of Windows, or that this will be corrected in future releases.

Disable and Remove Apparmor from Ubuntu Linux 7.04-8.10

AppArmor is a security extension (similar to SELinux) that should provide extended security on your Ubuntu system and it usually causes more problems than advantages. It can be removed safely and your system will remain reasonably secure, as nothing on the internet is absolutely secure. (This is a must do step if you want to install ISPConfig)

We can disable it like this:

/etc/init.d/apparmor stop
update-rc.d -f apparmor remove

And remove it with:

apt-get purge apparmor apparmor-utils

-or-

aptitude remove apparmor apparmor-utils

You may then optionally remove the apparmor & apparmor.d directories & contents from the /etc directory.