newbie cant get online

Forum: Networking
Topic: newbie cant get online
started by: sirka

Posted by sirka on Feb. 01 2007,01:51

I'm running dsl from a usb pen drive on an older ibm thinkpad (with a dead hard drive) using a linksys wpc11v4. My home wireless network uses a very long password which I think means it is WPA security.

I downloaded the windows xp drivers for the linksys and think I have ndiswrapper working correctly but havent ever used it before so I'm not sure. at the command line, as root, I ran:
# ndiswrapper -i net8180.inf
# modprobe ndiswrapper

ndiswrapper -l shows the driver installed & hardware present.
dmesg | grep ndiswrapper seems to show that everything is correct and working on wlan0.

I've tried a bunch of different things next, through the control panel & wpa_password/supplicant but really I dont know what the next step would be or if the steps above are correct. If anyone could offer some guidance or suggestions or links, I'd be incredibly appreciative.

Posted by roberts on Feb. 01 2007,02:05

Create /home/dsl/wpa_supplicant.conf
network={
ssid="your_essid_here"
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
pairwise=TKIP
psk="Your_very_long_text_password_here"
}

Then as root ...

ndiswrapper -i NET8180.INF
ndiswrapper -l
modprobe ndiswrapper
iwlist wlan0 scan
iwconfig wlan0 essid your_essid_here
wpa_supplicant -Bdd -Dndiswrapper -i wlan0 -c /home/dsl/wpa_supplicant.conf
pump -i wlan0

This works for me.
Good Luck.

If your password is hex digits, numbers and letters A-F then you are using WEP

Let us know.

Posted by sirka on Feb. 01 2007,03:37

thank you for the reply roberts.

i followed your directions step by step and there didnt seem to be any problems, however after pump -i wlan0, i get
Operation failed.

the only time i got any response that seemed possibly untoward was iwlist wlan0 scan, which returned:
Warning: driver for device wlan0 recommend version 18 of Wireless Extension, but has been compiled with version 16, therefore some driver features may not be available...

before displaying the info about my network. do you think that could be the problem?

Posted by roberts on Feb. 01 2007,04:03

If you got a list back from iwlist then it is a password/encryption problem.
You really need to know if you are using WPA or WEP

Posted by sirka on Feb. 01 2007,04:20

great to narrow it down.

my password is not hex (and my lanlord is a extremely security minded professional sys admin) so I'm pretty sure I'm using WPA

Posted by sirka on Feb. 04 2007,00:27

i still havent been able to get this...
any other suggestions you might be able to give?

i have tried using
# wpa_password my_ssid my_very_long_password

and replacing the line
psk="my_very_long_password"
in wpa_supplicant.conf with the psk gnerated by wpa_password

and tried adding the line
proto=WPA

and commenting out the line
pairwise=TKIP

and all the different combos of the above changes in wpa_supplicant.conf. none worked.

do i need to reboot inbetween making each change to wpa_supplicant?