Improved Network Wizard (and rc.network)

[davids45]

G'day,
Tried Puppy 4.1 last night as a full install.
Trying to use the wizard's ndiswrapper mode locked up Puppy with a "PREV_..not located" error box across the dialog box by which I assume I was supposed to locate the XP driver inf file.
Disabling the working wired connection (eth0) did not change things nor did blacklisting the various rt25xx drivers none of which support WPA. The Linux driver works but not for WPA so I have to revert to ndiswrapper.

Having happily used ndiswrapper since 2.17 for my WPA network/rt2570 wireless, I was getting quite fast at getting the WPA wireless running with the old wizard.

Almost instinctively I do all the blacklisting and wpa_supplicant edits before running the wizard with new Pup installs.

But this "PREV_..." error looks to be a problem in the wizard itself.

Any way around this?

David S.

[tempestuous]

various rt25xx drivers none of which support WPA

Your device should be compatible with the rt2500usb Linux driver, and this driver does support WPA.

[rarsa]

Hi!

Long time no see Dougal

I'm coming here as a user of the NEtwork wizard to report a bug

If I enter a PSK containing spaces, it gets saved to the file in the profiles folder but it does not get transferred to the WPA profiles folder when I select to use the profile. The file there stays with "defaultpsk".

I can still enter the -unencrypted- PSK directly in the file and everything works OK.

[davids45]

G'day Temp'us,

With all recent Pups, I continue to get the wizard's warning box that the Linux rt2570usb driver does not support WPA and then if/when I continue, the Profile box does not let me set up a WPA profile so I cannot log onto the network. That's where I usually stop and head for ndiswrapper. Which has been fine up until now.

Is this WPA warning/lock-out an error in the wizard that I can fix or work around, or is this non-WPA-support warning coming from the driver itself?

I could, of course, re-set our wireless router to WEP which looks OK. But that would involve changing her-indoors's Windows laptop set up, ... and you think you're tempestuous.

David S.

[tempestuous]

I continue to get the wizard's warning box that the Linux rt2570usb driver does not support WPA

The driver is "rt2500usb" not "rt2570usb", and as one of the new "mac80211" range of wifi drivers it definitely supports WPA. So there is a major flaw in the way that the Network Wizard reports WPA compatibility ... why has no one reported this before!
The 2.6.25.xx kernel has been in testing right back since the early days of Puppy 4.0-alpha's a year ago!

Sigh.
The attached dotpet of a revised /usr/sbin/wag-profiles.sh should fix the problem.
And I just discovered that the Prism54 drivers (p54pci & p54usb) also need fixing in this respect.

Dougal, the amendment is at line 271. And I also discovered that "ndiswrapper" is listed twice.

[Dougal]

The problem is how to make the reconnect on reboot work with the ASUS Eee with Puppy 4.1. If I install the modified madwifi for the Eee it works, and connects fine, but does not reconnect when reboot. Also after installing the Eee specific modified madwifi, other USB wireless adapters that did reconnect after reboot, no longer would.

It seems like the new driver is causing some kind of problem...
Try looking in /tmp/bootsysinit.log and at the output of dmesg and see if there are any errors that might help.

[Dougal]

Trying to use the wizard's ndiswrapper mode locked up Puppy with a "PREV_..not located" error box across the dialog box by which I assume I was supposed to locate the XP driver inf file.

That's probably the result of some coding typo in the new ndiswrapper code I added just before posting that version... I'll look into it.

[Dougal]

If I enter a PSK containing spaces, it gets saved to the file in the profiles folder but it does not get transferred to the WPA profiles folder when I select to use the profile. The file there stays with "defaultpsk".

Do you mean that the wpa_supplicant config file for it has defaultpsk? That would mean that the wpa_cli commands didn't do their job...
Have you tried running the wizard in debug mode, to see if it gave any errors?
Also, in the other thread you mentioned that it changes to "defaultpsk" in the profile editing window -- so I have the feeling that when it saves the profile and then reloads it, the passphrase isn't reloaded. I'll look into it this evening.

[Dougal]

The driver is "rt2500usb" not "rt2570usb", and as one of the new "mac80211" range of wifi drivers it definitely supports WPA. So there is a major flaw in the way that the Network Wizard reports WPA compatibility ... why has no one reported this before!
The 2.6.25.xx kernel has been in testing right back since the early days of Puppy 4.0-alpha's a year ago!

Sigh.

That is why people need to test and report problems... there's only so much I can do with the wizard when I don't even have a wireless router.

This is actually strange, though, since I use the rt73usb and the wizard does recognize it as supporting WPA...

[tempestuous]

I use the rt73usb and the wizard does recognize it as supporting WPA...

Yes, that's my fault. Back in the Puppy4.0 testing days we needed to investigate which wifi drivers in the new 2.6.25 kernel needed which -D parameter for wpa_supplicant, and I did some quick reading to update Barry. That was last May -
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 620#194620

I thought that only the Ralink rt61pci and rt73usb modules were supported by wpa_supplicant (since this was consistent with the older Ralink "legacy" drivers) and those 2 modules found their way into the Network Wizard as being WPA-compatible.
But we now know that "rt2400pci", "rt2500pci" and "rt2500usb" should be included, too. (Actually, RT2400 devices might not have inbuilt firmware support for WPA, I'm not sure).

[Dougal]

Trying to use the wizard's ndiswrapper mode locked up Puppy with a "PREV_..not located" error box across the dialog box by which I assume I was supposed to locate the XP driver inf file.
Disabling the working wired connection (eth0) did not change things nor did blacklisting the various rt25xx drivers none of which support WPA. The Linux driver works but not for WPA so I have to revert to ndiswrapper.

I think I found the problem, though I couldn't get it to crash -- maybe
because I use a different version of GTK/gtkdialog?

In the file chooser, the <default> field (where the chooser should open) was
set to PREV_LOCATION -- without the $...
This also got me thinking of cases when PREV_LOCATION is null or a non-existent
location (unmounted partition/deleted directory), so I added some saveguards
for such cases.

PS- You mentioned you use ndiswrapper because the native driver doesn't support
WPA, but I think it in fact does -- see previous tempestuous posts about modules
missing from the wizard "whitelist".

[Dougal]

If I enter a PSK containing spaces, it gets saved to the file in the profiles folder but it does not get transferred to the WPA profiles folder when I select to use the profile. The file there stays with "defaultpsk".

Ok, I think I found the problem.
The subshell that runs wpa_passphrase has another subshell in it for the
key (which I added to escape some funny chars), but it wasn't quoted...
This resulted in not getting a psk, so when wpa_cli tried to set it, it
did nothing, hence the unmodified psk.

However, this raised another thing altogether: that when you save the profile,
the wpa_supplicant config file doesn't get created/updated! (it was done
in useWpaSupplicant)
So I changed it to create/update the wpa_supplicant when you press "Save Profile"
and I also use sed to just modify the file, rather than play with wpa_cli.

[Dougal]

Another update:
- Fix the bug in the Ndiswrapper gui file chooser.
- Fix the bug with WPA keys that have spaces in them.
- Add missing modules to the WPA "whitelist" (rt2400pci,rt2500pci,rt2500usb,p54pci,p54usb)
and rearranged it a little (alphabetically!), so it's easier to see what's missing...
- Add creating/updating the wpa_supplicant config file when the user presses
"Save Profile" -- it used to only do that when the profile was first used...
Also move all that code out of the function that runs wpa_supplicant.


The issue with the rt2[45]00* and p54* modules missing from the WPA whitelist
reminds me of something I already asked before:
There are modules that might support WPA, but we've never tried, so
they're not in the whitelist. If anybody has a device that uses one of them,
it would be good if they could try "manually" and let me know, so I can add
them.
These are the questionable modules:
libertas modules (libertas_cs and usb8xxx)
prism54
atmel_*
airo*

[Béèm]

deleted, double posting.

[Béèm]

Dougal, I was just going to write that the eth2 FireWire device was detected and working on each boot. That was so for the las 7 days or until today.
No eth2 device anymore and the eth1394 module wasn't loaded.

I loaded by hand run the NW Wizard and got the FireWire device back.

I tried again to set the gateway either to blank or 0.0.0.0 as well as the dns1, but they both revert back to 192.168.1.1
Strangely dns 2 stays at 0.0.0.0 as I had configured it.

I just wanted to let you know this.

EDIT
Same with the 10th oct version. 0.0.0.0 don't stick.

[MU]

package removed, newer version available.

[davids45]

G'day Dougie & Temp'us,

Thanks for your perseverance through all this.

Clarifying my confusing use of rt2500 and rt2570 - the computer has a device identified as rt2570 which came with the XP driver rt2500.

Until the ndiswrapper glitsch in 4.1, I was happy to use ndiswrapper and the XP rt2500 driver when I came up against the wizard's WPA-not-supported message and the inability to ignore this message with regards to using the profile creation step following. Didn't know anything about white-lists, but was getting good at black-listing the rt2500 drivers so I could run ndiswrapper.

I tried once manually to use the linux rt2500usb driver but got time outs so tended to believe the WPA warning. I could well have been doing this incorrectly so don't put too much faith in that trial.

I have seen a couple of other forum messages about the 4.1's "PREV... " ndiswrapper problem so I hope those posters have found this thread.

I'll try the two new downloads (the fix pet and the latest wizard gz) and see how I go.

David S.

[tempestuous]

These are the questionable modules:
libertas modules (libertas_cs and usb8xxx)
prism54
atmel_*
airo*

prism54 module: no WPA support, but it doesn't matter because it has been replaced by the p54pci module. (Maybe this means the PREFLIST should contain "prism54:p54pci"

libertas_cs and usb8xxx: since these are very new I would expect them to support WPA, but they are based on the old ieee80211 wifi stack so it's hard to tell until someone actually tries a WPA connection.

atmel_* and airo*: probably no WPA support. These drivers are for very old B-mode wifi devices.

[davids45]

G'day,
While waiting for some concrete to set, I tried the 10th October wizard pet on my 4.1 Full install.

The linux rt2500usb driver loaded up and I did not get the warning about WPA-lack-of-support so proceeded to use it via the wizard
Established wlan0, so I could scan the neighbourhood's wifis. While I could see my wireless router, I could not log onto it with the WPA profile.

Switched to the ndiswrapper option. The pet version gave me the "PREV_..." error so installed the tar.gz wizard version. Got past the "PREV_etc" error and could find the inf file on my data partition on my second hard-drive that is common for all my Pups.

But now I cannot actually load the inf file. I highlight it and click OK but the wizard cycles back asking me to again locate the inf file.

Giving up and optimistically just using the wizard to try to log on the my wireless as it is (ndiswrapper is displayed for wlan0), I get the message detail below:

Failed to connect to wpa_supplicant - wpa_ctrl_open: No such file or directory

As far as I can tell, all 3 wpa_supplicant.conf files in various places in the /etc directory have the correct details.

David S.

[enry183]

same problem of davids45, i cannot load the .inf file