Troubleshooting wireless DSL connection

Question

I have had an interesting bout with my DSL modem (Actiontec GT701-WG) that I got close to resolving but not quite. Ignoring all the intermediate details, I upgraded the firmware to the latest version and that got the hardware to appear normal again: I have steady power, DSL, wireless, and internet lights on the box. If I plug in an Ethernet cable, the hardwired connection works fine.

On my two computers (Windows XP and Windows Vista), both see my DSL modem as a wireless network but neither can make a successful connection to it. Note that I have both WPA enabled and MAC-address filtering enabled for security. (I can connect wirelessly to a nearby, unsecured wifi network.)

The DSL provider has suggested to try turning off security, or to try renaming the network. I will try those but before I do I was hoping to check some log on the computer that might actually indicate what the problem is (e.g. "bad WPA key", "invalid network name", or something of that sort).

Is there any default logging for wireless connections (or connections in general) and where do I find it? Or how do I enable it?

Answer 1

While Matt's link probably deserves credit as an answer, I found something that is a lot simpler so I think it is a better answer in spirit:

When I attempted a connection from WinXP, the computer pops up a box with "acquiring..." for a while that eventually failed and the pop-up just went away.

But when I attempted a connection from Vista, once it failed it gave a one-line reason, indicating the association list denied access.

So for me, just switching to a different computer gave me the little bit of feedback needed, compared to no feedback from WinXP.

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Some additional info that might be useful to you if you find yourself in a similar situation:

A quick web search helped me realize that this error message was talking about the MAC-address filtering list I had indeed enabled a long time ago. Checking the list, though, revealed a bug in the firmware upgrade procedure--it had removed 2 of the 3 devices I had originally entered in the list! Once I restored the list to my 3 devices then my system was truly back up and running.