help with DWL-G520 and WPA

Forum: Networking
Topic: help with DWL-G520 and WPA
started by: fightie

Posted by fightie on May 09 2007,15:38

I'm using a D-Link DWL-G520 PCI card. The card is auto detected on boot with the madwifi drivers. When I type

Code Sample

#wpa_supplicant -B -Dmadwifi -i ath0 -c /cdrom/wifi/wpa.conf

There is no error message (no message at all really)
but then

Code Sample

#pump -i ath0
Operation failed.

I tried using ndiswrapper divers as well, but without success (something about WPA not supported).
wpa.conf is

Code Sample

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant

network={
ssid="*****"
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
psk="*****"
proto=WPA
}

iwconfig shows my essid and my access point, but no ip address. Any hints on where to go next?

Posted by bingo on May 09 2007,18:15

I have a similar problem with my Atheros card and support for WPA. Please see my post in this forum. From my experience wpa_supplicant does not show error message when run in the background. If you start it in the foreground and enable debugging, there should be plenty of messages;

wpa_supplicant -dd -Dmadwifi -i ath0 -c /cdrom/wifi/wpa.conf

Look for whether or not your network is found, or other error messages appear.

Posted by fightie on May 09 2007,20:27

I found a solution (I'm using WPA, not WPA2 like bingo, but it worked for me)

First, rmmod any modules with ath_ (I had ath_hal, ath_pci, and ath_rate_sample I think) to clear out the madwifi drivers. Then use ndiswrapper drivers on the drivers for your card, and wpa_supplicant will work fine with the ndiswrapper drivers. If you do not rmmod the ath drivers first, the ndiswrapper drivers will not take over the hardware, and the wpa_suppilcant will fail.

I think another donation will be in order soon. Great work DSL team.

Posted by fightie on May 11 2007,18:32

Hmm... since I switched to ndiswrapper with wpasupplicant, I get kernel panics (system freeze + keyboard lights flashing) when transfering files and/or running vnc sessions to DSL. When I switch back to madwifi and wep, no panics.

Panics were on some VNC seesions (DSL is the server, using the mydsl package), and every time I tried copying large (~300M) files via sftp or smb to DSL. It would panic early in the transfer (<100M).

So close, and yet so far...