sfsp's Journal: Wireless and Linux

I finally got it to work. But it's still a crapshoot if it will work next time, too.

I found a Netgear WGR614 v6 router at a yard sale for $4 and brought it home. This happened just before my upgrade to DSL, see earlier post. I bought an ASUS WL-138G v2 card from Shentech.com and started clawing my way toward wirelessness.

First, I set up the card. You have to use the bcm43xx-fwcutter app to slice and dice the actual firmware out of your Windows driver so the bcm43xx kernel module can load it. Then you have to learn to use the wireless-tools package to scan for access points. This wasn't too hard.

Next, I set up the router. I chose my SSID and channel, and left everything unencrypted. I was able to configure the card with my SSID and channel, and it worked fine. Next I added WEP encryption on the router, which is almost more secure than unencrypted. A little bit of work with configuration files, and WEP worked, too.

Of course, you don't want WEP, you want WPA encryption. Setting up the router was easy. Getting the card to work at all has been somewhat difficult, and I haven't figured out the exact number of chickens I have to sacrifice to the network gods to make the juju work reliably.

Having things happen automatically seems to be a recipe for failure. The /etc/network/interfaces file should let you automagically start the card, negotiate the encryption, and request an address. In fact, the card comes up with the wrong SSID, on the wrong channel, and so the encryption negotiation fails, followed soon after by the DHCP request.

So far, the most reliable method I have found (2 out of 10) is as follows:

1. Reboot and get into X-Windows
2. su to root. Make sure ifconfig sees the card. Make sure iwconfig sees the card.
3. Run wpa_supplicant. The command line and the configuration file both have to be RIGHT.
4. Run wpa_gui. Now you can watch the repeated failures.

If it doesn't work in a couple of minutes, you might select Edit Network in wpa_gui and re-enter the WPA key. BUT, contrary to the man page and the text balloons, THIS HAS TO BE IN HEX. Use wpa_passphrase to convert your passphrase to your hex key.

Then, use wpa_action reload to reload the wpa_supplicant.

If this doesn't work, start over at step 1.

But, if it did, you can now run dhclient to acquire an address, gateway, dns server....

AAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!