How do you know your using WPA2?

This might be a stupid question- but here goes.

I bought a new router, this one is a Linksys WRT54GC - its a compact internal antenna 802.11g wifi router, which at first I thought would be bad since it has an internal antenna, then I thought - thats probably a good thing, since it would limit the long range availability of my network

Anyway, my previous 802.11g router was an Airlink, and didn't support WPA2, only WPA +TKIP ... ok fine. I set it up, etc - it all worked great. A thread or two later, it was suggested to use WPA2 if that option is available to you, so with this new router IT IS.. I setup the new Linksys router, the options were WPA2 personal or WPA2 mixed mode AES +TKIP .....

Once I powered it all up, my laptop immediately connected to the new router (as I had set all the same SSID, pw's, etc as the previous router) ... but the laptop was set for WPA (1) mode. I manually changed the laptop settings to WPA2, and it again connected - but I had to set the laptop to AES mode - TKIP didn't work.

Now: I don't even KNOW what AES and TKIP are or mean! but I can follow directions.... and now the main question is, how can you tell if your wifi connection is encrypted or not, and which version of WPA its using...?

 

It's OK- if you have AES enabled than you do use WPA2- only WPA2 supports AES. WPA supports TKIP only. Anyway- you have the best protection possible at this time (don't know the "n" standard though as it's pre-n so far)