Netgear MA401RA with WPAd

Forum: Networking
Topic: Netgear MA401RA with WPAd
started by: theycallmebruce

Posted by theycallmebruce on Jan. 03 2007,13:39

I am a bit of a Linux newbie, so please bear with me. This will be a pretty long post, but believe me it's the abbreviated version.

I downloaded DSL and did a hard disk install on a 500 MHz Toshiba laptop with 128 MB RAM. That went very smoothly and I was impressed with the speed (the other distributions I tried were unusably slow).

Next task was to get the Netgear MA401 PCMCIA 802.11b card working. My wireless network uses WPA-PSK.

After much reading of documentation and googling, I think I have figured out what I need to do, but I'm a bit stuck.

To get WPA working, I need wpasupplicant. I enabled apt-get and used it to download the wpasupplicant debian package.

Now, the MA401RA card which I am using has a Prism 2.5 chipset. By default, DSL uses the orinoco_cs driver for this card.

Unfortunately, wpasupplicant does not support this driver. For the Prism 2/2.5/3 chipset, it supports ndiswrapper, linuxant driverloader, and the hostap driver. I figured I'd go with the hostap driver.

First I tried using apt-get to download a debian binary package of the hostap driver. I was able to load that driver, but it was version 0.0.4 which does not support WPA.

I decided to compile the driver from source, so I added the gcc+libs and kernel source myDSL packages, then downloaded the stable hostap-driver v0.4.9 source from the hostap homepage (http://hostap.epitest.fi/).

This is where I am stuck. I cannot build the driver. When I run make in the source directory, first it selects the wrong make target (there are two: 2.4 and 2.6) because of a missing Rules.make file in the kernel source.

If I do a "make 2.4", I get "No rule to make target `modules'. If you look at the 2.4 target in the makefile, it calls another make command which includes the kernel source directory with -C, and with parameter SUBDIRS=$(PWD)/driver/modules/ and target "modules".

Please help!

I looked at the kernel source directory, and it seems a bit sparse. There is just an include directory and a documentation directory. Is this right?

When I get this going I plan to write a detailed howto so other newbies can get this working...

Posted by roberts on Jan. 03 2007,15:45

The latest DSL v2.3RC2 has both ndiswrapper and wpasupplicant, which my the way has been tested and works. I have posted twice now my wpa_supplicant.conf file which uses ndiswrapper. This approach would be so much easier.

Posted by theycallmebruce on Jan. 04 2007,00:41

I will give ndiswrapper a go.

The reason I decided to use the hostap driver is that my card wasn't in the list of ndiswrapper known working cards. Also, I read several pages which say that it is necessary to update the firmware on the card, which is possible using hostap but not ndiswrapper (as far as I can tell).

Posted by theycallmebruce on Jan. 05 2007,03:56

OK, I'm a bit stuck with ndiswrapper now.

Following the instructions on the ndiswrapper site, I downloaded the latest windows driver for the MA401 from the Netgear support website. My card is not listed on their "known working" list.

Next, using the Windows XP driver, I ran "ndiswrapper -i NETMA401.inf". I get "Installing netma401", and that's it.

According to the installation guide, I should get something like "Installed ndis drivers:
bcmwl5 driver present, hardware present"

The files have been copied to /etc/ndiswrapper, and ndiswrapper -l lists the driver as "netma401 driver installed".

Going ahead with the instructions, I do "depmod -a", which returns no error. Then "rmmod prism2_cs" to unload the prism2 driver which was loaded on startup. The "modprobe ndiswrapper" to load the new driver.

dmesg now shows "prism2_cs.o: 0.2.1-pre21 unloaded" and "ndiswrapper version 1.14 loaded (preempt=no,smp=yes)" as the last two lines. But I don't see "wlan0: ndiswrapper ethernet device xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx" which the installation guide says I should see if there is a card supported by one of the loaded drivers.

Does anyone know what am I doing wrong here?