Wireless Networking with WPA Support

Forum: Networking
Topic: Wireless Networking with WPA Support
started by: bingo

Posted by bingo on May 09 2007,10:21

Hello,

I am trying to establish a wireless connection to a WLAN using WPA2 security using DSL embedded 3.3. My wireless LAN card is based on Atheros 5212 and works well under Windows and other Linux distributions. I do realize that I have to start wpa_supplicant using adequate configuration files, etc.

Once wpa_supplicant is started, it establishes the right interface ath0 and tries to connect - it never succeeds. I can see it scan for networks, and it finds the network I am trying to connect to as well. Somewhere along the process there are error messages like

ioctl(IEEE80211_IOCTL_SETMLME): argument list too long

I have tried to search this error message. The main feedback I collected is that this error message might be caused by incompatibility of wireless extensions in the kernel, wireless tools, and the driver (madwifi in this case). The command

iwconfig --version

shows that all three components are based on version 16. According to the author of these components and his website

< http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Tools.html >

support for WPA/WPA2 is only included starting with version 18.

My question is if anybody succeeded in connecting to a WPA2 encrypted network using DSL version 3.3. I would be interested in any details and also if he/she got it to work "out of the box".

Any comments are welcome.

Posted by roberts on May 09 2007,12:12

Obviously I have used it and others too.
See this < thread. >

Posted by bingo on May 09 2007,18:23

thanks for the reply. I understand that wireless using WPA2 is supported in version 3.3.

Do you have any suggestions as to how to proceed? I have seen a similar post in this forum indicating problems with an Atheros based wireless LAN card and WPA encryption. My wpa_supplicant.conf file works fine with Knoppix 5.01, should it be any different for DSL?

Posted by fightie on May 09 2007,20:30

I found a solution for this. See my post "help with DWL-G520 and WPA" for my success with an Atheros card.

Posted by bingo on May 10 2007,04:57

thanks for the information. I will give it a try.

On the other hand, this was exactly the reason for my question, if the Atheros card with WPA/WPA2 is supported ¨out of the box¨ with the driver that´s included in the distribution. Your solution points in the direction that something is not working well with the built-in madwifi driver.

Posted by bingo on May 14 2007,08:29

okay, I can say that it works even with WPA2 as suggested by fightie and roberts, however, I did not try to load any large files.

Here is the script I am using to start the wireless network with WPA2. It is based on the references provided by roberts and fightie. I put two files with the drivers in the root directory of my USB memory stick, from which I am actually booting: net5211.inf and AR5211.sys. They come from the Atheros drivers for Windows.

Code Sample

#!/bin/bash
# shell script to start wireless networking with WPA2
# with DSL 3.3 and Atheros 5212 based mini-PCI card.
# May 11, 2007

# The original Atheros kernel modules need to be removed.
# They don't work with WPA/WPA2 probably due to incompatible versions.

rmmod ath_pci
rmmod ath_rate_sample
rmmod ath_hal

# Start the ndiswrapper driver using Atheros' Windows drivers.
# Print a confirmation message that the drivers are loaded.

ndiswrapper -i /cdrom/net5211.inf
ndiswrapper -l

# Insert the ndiswrapper driver in the kernel
# First remove any leftover ndiswrapper drivers.

modprobe -r ndiswrapper
modprobe ndiswrapper
sleep 5

# Now start wpa_supplicant with the configuration file

wpa_supplicant -B -Dndiswrapper -i wlan0 -c /cdrom/wpa_supplicant.conf

# Obtain an IP address

pump -i wlan0

I will continue to run tests with the setup; as I said, I haven't tried loading big files yet. For general internet access and browsing it has worked so far. Thanks a lot for your helpful suggestions.