Wireless works, but WEP won't :(

[randomguy]

Hi all. I'm new to Puppy Linux but not Linux in general (been using Ubuntu on and off for about 6 months). Anyway I have a problem that's causing me a lot of frustration, hopefully someone here can help me out.

I have a pretty old-ish laptop (333mhz, 128mb RAM) with a PCMCIA wireless card (Proxim 8430). My router is a Linksys Wireless WRT54G (v6). I've been wanting to put Linux on this laptop, the first distro I tried was Xubuntu which was too slow for my liking, so next I tried Puppy Linux. Puppy seems to be a lot more lightweight than Xubuntu, and I would be using it as my primary OS on the laptop if it weren't for the fact that I can't get WEP encryption to work! It worked fine on Xubuntu ("out of the box", too) so I know my wireless card *can* use WEP in Linux, I just can't figure out why it won't work in Puppy..

According to this webpage, my Proxim 8430 should be using the 'hostap' driver. I tried the hostap_cs driver in Puppy, when the driver loads it says it recognizes the device but when I scan for a wireless network it can't find mine. Even entering the SSID manually doesn't do anything, it doesn't seem to be able to connect to anything. Turning WEP encryption on/off didn't make a difference.

So I scrolled through the list of drivers and decided to try the orinoco_cs driver for the hell of it. Lo and behold, this driver enables me to connect wirelessly to my router, but only with NO encryption! If I enable WEP, the connection test fails, and I can't visit any websites.

Can anyone help me out with this? I've finally found the right distro for my laptop (the sound even works, couldn't get it to work on Xubuntu) but I'm not willing to leave an open wireless point just so I can use the Internet on it. (I'm aware of MAC address filtering, but I really would like to have WEP on as well). Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Edit: forgot to mention, this is with Puppy Linux 2.14

[John Doe]

If I enable WEP, the connection test fails

How do you enter the key?

Do you enter the key as ascii or hex?

[tempestuous]

The orinoco driver is very old, and does not support scanning.
There is an ENHANCED version of the orinoco driver which DOES support scanning, but let's see if we can get your HostAP driver working first:

The HostAP driver has a few quirks. Sometimes this driver will load in "master" mode (as an access point) but for normal "client" use it needs to be in "managed" mode. So before running the Network Wizard, set up the driver by running some commands in rxvt, in either of these ways -

## OPTION 1
rmmod orinoco_cs
rmmod hostap_cs
modprobe hostap_cs iw_mode=2
ifconfig wlan0 up

## or OPTION 2
rmmod orinoco_cs
modprobe hostap_cs
iwconfig wlan0 mode managed
ifconfig wlan0 up

[ObligatoryMoniker]

I am having the same issue that randomguy has. I have a Microsoft wireless MN-520 pcmcia card that I have been using with XUbuntu but puppy linux looks like it will run much faster. When I boot up the card is detected and works with orinoco_cs drivers but has no WEP support which I need.

I have tried rmmod orinoco_cs so that I can remove that module and instead load the other hostap_cs module but it says that I can't unload it because it is in use which it is since puppy uses this driver for my card by default. If I pull out the card it then says that it can't find the orinoco_cs module to remove it.

So, How do I stop the module from running so that I can remove it and load hostap_cs instead. Tempestuous I really appreciate your contributions to this forum and I hope that you can help us resolve this issue as well. Thanks in advance for the help.

[randomguy]

If I enable WEP, the connection test fails

How do you enter the key?

Do you enter the key as ascii or hex?

I'm not sure? I enter the key exactly as it appears in my router's setup, the 26 numbers and letters.

The orinoco driver is very old, and does not support scanning.
There is an ENHANCED version of the orinoco driver which DOES support scanning, but let's see if we can get your HostAP driver working first:

The HostAP driver has a few quirks. Sometimes this driver will load in "master" mode (as an access point) but for normal "client" use it needs to be in "managed" mode. So before running the Network Wizard, set up the driver by running some commands in rxvt, in either of these ways -

## OPTION 1
rmmod orinoco_cs
rmmod hostap_cs
modprobe hostap_cs iw_mode=2
ifconfig wlan0 up

## or OPTION 2
rmmod orinoco_cs
modprobe hostap_cs
iwconfig wlan0 mode managed
ifconfig wlan0 up

I have tried both of your suggestions and it still can't see my network (like I said before, manually entering my SSID doesn't work either). It seems that the only driver that works is the orinoco_cs one but I can't get WEP working with it. You said something about an enhanced orinoco driver, can you tell me how I could try that one?

Thanks

[John Doe]

I enter the key exactly as it appears in my router's setup, the 26 numbers and letters.

That's 128 Hex.

You can check if it's getting assigned to the device by typing:

iwconfig

[randomguy]

I enter the key exactly as it appears in my router's setup, the 26 numbers and letters.

That's 128 Hex.

You can check if it's getting assigned to the device by typing:

iwconfig

Here's a screenshot of the output of iwconfig (apologies for the quality, had to use my digital camera). There doesn't seem to be any mention of a WEP key there, but I assigned it in the network setup. (btw this is with the orinoco_cs driver)

[tempestuous]

To stop a module from loading, you can "blacklist" it in /etc/rc.d/rc.modules
as explained by rarsa here -
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 578#103578

I think that the HostAP driver should be a better solution, but if you want the "enhanced" version of the orinoco driver, it's here -
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 2709#92709

[randomguy]

Okay, I've made some progress, but still not there yet.

I decided to try the hostap_cs driver again. But this time I did a manual config through the command line, following the instructions here. Basically I did these commands:

Code: Select all

iwconfig wlan0 essid blahblah mode managed channel 11 key <mykey>
dhcpcd -t 20 -d wlan0 

And you know what, it worked. Kind of. I know the laptop is communicating with the router because it shows up in the DHCP Table in the router's setup page. It was issued an IP address of 192.168.1.100 by the DHCP server. I checked the network setup and it even filled in the primary and secondary DNS server values. But I can't access the Internet! I tried pinging google.com and it says it can't resolve the host name. Even pinging the router at 192.168.1.1 doesn't return a response, which I don't understand because the laptop must've communicated somewhat with the router to have acquired the DNS info and to be issued an IP address.
I'm stumped.

[tempestuous]

Yes, doing the whole setup from the commandline is a good way to troubleshoot.
More thorough instructions (specific to HostAP) are here -
http://puppyfiles.org/dotpupsde/dotpups ... README.txt

[randomguy]

Yes, doing the whole setup from the commandline is a good way to troubleshoot.
More thorough instructions (specific to HostAP) are here -
http://puppyfiles.org/dotpupsde/dotpups ... README.txt

I followed that guide, and still, no luck. The laptop receives an IP address from my router but yet it can't access the Internet. I've included screenshots of the output of iwconfig and ifconfig below, hopefully someone can get some useful information from them.




And here's a screenshot from my router's setup, showing the laptop on the DHCP server:



Any ideas?

[John Doe]

"Security Mode:"

Try 'open'.

iwconfig wlan0 key open

or/and

iwconfig wifi0 key open

(if that works, in the future just set the key without the restricted flag)

like:

iwconfig device key 26charactershere

Do you have two cards or is that just because of the PCMCIA?

[tempestuous]

First I would disable encryption at the router and check that the HostAP driver works without encryption. If successful, now we can move on to using WEP.

I see "Security mode:restricted" and I'm wondering if this should be "open". So try the "open" parameter in your iwconfig command -

iwconfig wlan0 essid MY_ESSID key open 1234567890

EDIT: John Doe beat me to it by seconds ... at least we're on the same wavelength.
Don't worry about "wifi0", that's a "virtual interface" or "placeholder".

[John Doe]

John Doe beat me to it by seconds ... at least we're on the same wavelength.

I've had that happen a couple times also. I agree same wavelength is good.

Don't worry about "wifi0", that's a "virtual interface" or "placeholder".

Thanks for the info. The one PCMCIA wifi card I had broke before I found Puppy, so I've never seen one in action. This thread was great though because I have a friend with one and he was wondering how to get it going. Now I think I can try to get him through the process.

[randomguy]

Thanks for the help. I will try your suggestions tomorrow after I get home from work and let you guys know how it went, right now it's nearly 1:00am and I need sleep.

[randomguy]

First I would disable encryption at the router and check that the HostAP driver works without encryption. If successful, now we can move on to using WEP.

I see "Security mode:restricted" and I'm wondering if this should be "open". So try the "open" parameter in your iwconfig command -

iwconfig wlan0 essid MY_ESSID key open 1234567890

EDIT: John Doe beat me to it by seconds ... at least we're on the same wavelength.
Don't worry about "wifi0", that's a "virtual interface" or "placeholder".

Still no luck. I tried disabling WEP on the router and then entering the commands leaving out the key value, but then the router won't even issue the laptop an IP address. I also tried putting the word 'open' before the key, like key open <mykey> but that didn't seem to make a difference either. It did change the security mode from restricted to open but I still couldn't ping or connect to websites.

Anything else I could try? I appreciate all the help but I'm beginning to wonder if I'll ever get this working.

[tempestuous]

DHCP seems to be a problem, so I would try to assign a static IP address instead.
If this fails, then blacklist the hostap_cs driver and try the enhanced orinoco driver.

[randomguy]

I ended up buying a used Linksys PCMCIA card and WEP works fine on it. Apparently I needed to upgrade the firmware on the Proxim card in order to get WEP support in Linux, but I couldn't get that to work so I just bought another one. Thanks to everyone that tried to help me though.

[cthisbear]

WEP key wireless cracking made easy

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/04 ... _cracking/

Code breakers have discovered a technique for extracting a 104-bit Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) key in under a minute.

Something to look at...I know b......all about wireless.
Chris