For whatever reason last night my OpenWRT access point decided to stop working. My laptop would connect for a second and then disconnect. I tried another wifi card and it did the same thing, which eliminated my laptop as the culprit. I turned off WEP and was able to connect. The weirdest thing was when I would try to turn WEP back on, I got this error (in bold):

[root@alberto ~]# iwconfig wl0
wl0 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"zmonkey.org"
Mode:Master Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 00:0F:66:4A:DF:08
Tx-Power:19 dBm
RTS thr:2347 B Fragment thr:2346 B
Encryption key:<too big>

I'm not comfortable without encryption (although honestly I would like to run a captive portal alongside my encrypted network), so after a few reboots and unsuccessful attempts to get WEP working I gave WPA a shot. It's really what I should be running anyway but I've had WEP set up for so long I just didn't feel like dealing with it.

But luckily, it worked out quite flawlessly. Following a guide I found here I got it set up quite simply. I did have to reboot to get the changes to take, but not a big deal. The only remaining problem is reliably getting my laptop to use WPA. That's the real reason I've delayed. I've gotten it to work before, but it's sometimes been a pain. All in the name of progress, I suppose.