Hi,

in Slackware 12 after loading firmware for ipw2200 wifi card i was able to
use it in a stable way using open transmission.

This time it happened to me I have to use it with WEP, which unexpectedly
fails.

With iwconfig I set up essid, key, which is either provided as plain text
or hex code; the card seem to associate corectly since the proper led
indicates this and dmesg claim that WEP became registered protocol.

Yet after dhcpcd eth1 network parameters are never obtained .
iwlist claims WEP is not supported but WPA. True, ieee*wep* module is not
loaded and when I try to do this manualy, it complains that WEP protocol
is unregistered. Weired again, should not it work, since it is part of
kernel?

Anyway I wonder if anyone managed to use WEP with ipw2200 under
Slackware12?

Some people were having the same problems under different
distros but they were configuration errors or no real solution was
provided.

As always thank you for any advice.

--
luk

On Sun, 16 Dec 2007 22:51:44 +0100, MrEvening wrote:

> Hi,
>
> in Slackware 12 after loading firmware for ipw2200 wifi card i was able to
> use it in a stable way using open transmission.
>
> This time it happened to me I have to use it with WEP, which unexpectedly
> fails.
>
> With iwconfig I set up essid, key, which is either provided as plain text
> or hex code; the card seem to associate corectly since the proper led
> indicates this and dmesg claim that WEP became registered protocol.
>
> Yet after dhcpcd eth1 network parameters are never obtained .
> iwlist claims WEP is not supported but WPA. True, ieee*wep* module is not
> loaded and when I try to do this manualy, it complains that WEP protocol
> is unregistered. Weired again, should not it work, since it is part of
> kernel?
>
> Anyway I wonder if anyone managed to use WEP with ipw2200 under
> Slackware12?
>
> Some people were having the same problems under different
> distros but they were configuration errors or no real solution was
> provided.
>
> As always thank you for any advice.
>
I haven't used WEP. I have used open access, and WPA2 in preshared key
mode, though. WPA is setup using wpa_supplicant. It looks like iwconfig
does WEP without the wpa_supplicant, and that it should work AFAIK with
something like this

# iwconfig ethx ESSID "SOMEBASE"
# iwconfig ethx key 0123-4567-89
# dhcpcd -t 15 -d ethx


Also, you might be interested in the kernel changelog for version
2.6.23.9. This kernel addressed problems with the ipw2200 driver. This
kernel is available in "-current"

Also, I have set the rate using thisommand

# iwconfig ethx rate 5.5M auto

But sometimes it requires multiple tries with dhcpcd to get an IP address.
This is probably due to a problem at the base station, though.

--
Douglas Mayne

On 2007-12-16, MrEvening <lukaswu@posejdon.wpk.p.lodz.pl> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> in Slackware 12 after loading firmware for ipw2200 wifi card i was able to
> use it in a stable way using open transmission.
>
> This time it happened to me I have to use it with WEP, which unexpectedly
> fails.
>
> With iwconfig I set up essid, key, which is either provided as plain text
> or hex code; the card seem to associate corectly since the proper led
> indicates this and dmesg claim that WEP became registered protocol.
>
> Yet after dhcpcd eth1 network parameters are never obtained .
> iwlist claims WEP is not supported but WPA. True, ieee*wep* module is not
> loaded and when I try to do this manualy, it complains that WEP protocol
> is unregistered. Weired again, should not it work, since it is part of
> kernel?
>
> Anyway I wonder if anyone managed to use WEP with ipw2200 under
> Slackware12?

Yup, I use it, no problem at all. Much more solid for me than ipw3945
cards.

Why don't you write back with the output of
iwconfig
(as root, edit out your wireless password) and give the explicit
commands you use with iwconfig to set up your config.

Cheers.

Jim

On Sun, 16 Dec 2007 16:04:33 -0700, Douglas Mayne wrote:

> Also, you might be interested in the kernel changelog for version
> 2.6.23.9. This kernel addressed problems with the ipw2200 driver. This
> kernel is available in "-current"
>
> Also, I have set the rate using thisommand
>
> # iwconfig ethx rate 5.5M auto
>
> But sometimes it requires multiple tries with dhcpcd to get an IP
> address. This is probably due to a problem at the base station, though.

AFAICT, dhcpcd does not play very nicely with wireless interfaces, and it
seems especially difficult to get an IP address from a base station with
hidden ESSID. It may be worth trying dhclient and seeing whether that
makes a difference.

Mark South wrote:

> AFAICT, dhcpcd does not play very nicely with wireless interfaces, ...

My experience is quite the opposite. I have a Toshiba Tecra S1 laptop,
now running Slackware-12.0 (with a custom-built Linux-2.6.23.1 kernel),
and connecting daily to a (enterprise) wireless network via its built-in
IPW2200 wireless interface. The DHCP server is locally installed (rather
than the one supplied with the OS distribution) ISC-DHCP version 3.1.0
on a Slackware-9.1 system, and dhcpcd (as shipped with Slackwatr-12.0)
has no trouble at all getting addresses from it.

--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Sylvain Robitaille syl@alcor.concordia.ca

Systems and Network analyst Concordia University
Instructional & Information Technology Montreal, Quebec, Canada
----------------------------------------------------------------------

>
> Yup, I use it, no problem at all. Much more solid for me than ipw3945
> cards.
>
> Why don't you write back with the output of
> iwconfig
> (as root, edit out your wireless password) and give the explicit
> commands you use with iwconfig to set up your config.
>

To begin with, I have never had any problems with dhcpcd, if they were,
they were, they were always with buggy dhcp servers.

Anyway, the sequence goes:

iwconfig indicates as follows:

Cell 01 - Address: 00:08:A1:A8:02A
ESSID:"Exploris"
Protocol:IEEE 802.11bg
Mode:Master
Channel:11
Encryption keyn
Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 6 Mb/s
9 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s; 24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s
48 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s
Quality=77/100 Signal level=-52 dBm
Extra: Last beacon: 64ms ago

then

iwconfig eth1 essid Exploris key s:BLAblaBLA

which gives correct hex code:

iwconfig once again

eth1 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"Exploris" Nickname:"slacky"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.462 GHz Access Point:
00:08:A1:A8:02A
Bit Rate:54 Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm Sensitivity=8/0
Retry limit:7 RTS thrff Fragment thrff
Encryption key:3339-3735-3637-3437-4141-0000-00 Security
modepen
Power Managementff
Link Quality=77/100 Signal level=-52 dBm Noise level=-87 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:40 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

finally:

dhcpcd eth1


And as a result no IP is assigned though wifi card stayed connected to AP

dhcpcd debug looks like this:

dmesg states as follows:
ieee80211_crypt: registered algorithm 'WEP'

A bit puzzling to me is the fact that module ieee80211_crypt_wep is never
loaded and dmesg somehow regonizes this protocol. Possibly another
ieee80211 module handle this since modinfo ipw2200 does not mention WEP
among supported protocols.

Anyway I provided passphrase with and without s: option, tried to run
dhcpcd with -r option.

On the other hand I will give a different dhcp client a try since dhcpcd
-d returns "timed out waiting for a valid DHCP server response "

--
luk

On Mon, 17 Dec 2007 15:08:21 +0000, Sylvain Robitaille wrote:

> Mark South wrote:
>
>> AFAICT, dhcpcd does not play very nicely with wireless interfaces, ...
>
> My experience is quite the opposite. I have a Toshiba Tecra S1 laptop,
> now running Slackware-12.0 (with a custom-built Linux-2.6.23.1 kernel),
> and connecting daily to a (enterprise) wireless network via its built-in
> IPW2200 wireless interface. The DHCP server is locally installed
> (rather than the one supplied with the OS distribution) ISC-DHCP version
> 3.1.0 on a Slackware-9.1 system, and dhcpcd (as shipped with
> Slackwatr-12.0) has no trouble at all getting addresses from it.

I'm glad it is working for you. Since my anecdotal evidence conflicts
with yours, I would advise anyone to try both and see which works better
in a given situation. Certainly neither dhcpcd nor dhclient are
foolproof.

This is only hypothesis, but dhcpcd seems _to_me_ to be slightly more
sensitive to timings, and wireless interfaces tend to have slightly
slower responses when it comes to setting up and tearing down a
connection. The reason I suspect this is because when I have used dhcpcd
with a wireless interface, the timeout that I set seemed to make a
difference to the success rate when it came to gettig an IP address. But
that is strictly my impression coloured by my own experience, and I offer
it as such.

YMMV, no warranty express or implied, errors & omissions excepted, &c.

> This is only hypothesis, but dhcpcd seems _to_me_ to be slightly more
> sensitive to timings,

that's configurable

> and wireless interfaces tend to have slightly slower responses when it
> comes to setting up and tearing down a connection.

It might be that your wifi driver is shitty or alternativelly your router
is.. I had a router that would do very stupid things on a DHCP request and
most of the time dhclient would timeout. I replaced that with an
Asus+OpenWRT and it works great.


--
damjan

On Mon, 17 Dec 2007 20:00:05 +0100, Damjan wrote:

>> This is only hypothesis, but dhcpcd seems _to_me_ to be slightly more
>> sensitive to timings,
>
> that's configurable

Hence my sentence including "the timeout that I set seemed to make a
difference".

>> and wireless interfaces tend to have slightly slower responses when it
>> comes to setting up and tearing down a connection.
>
> It might be that your wifi driver is shitty or alternativelly your
> router is..

While I do appreciate an insult as much as the next man, the experiences
I am relating are comparisons made on the same router(s) and network(s).

That said, to a good approximation, all hardware is shitty. This has
been true for many years, although it was not always so.

> I had a router that would do very stupid things on a DHCP
> request and most of the time dhclient would timeout. I replaced that
> with an Asus+OpenWRT and it works great.

Recommendation noted. And as I said to Sylvain, I am glad it is working
for you.

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On 2007-12-17, Mark South <mark.south@null.invalid> wrote:
> While I do appreciate an insult as much as the next man

I don't wanna talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough
wiper! I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and
your father smelt of elderberries!

> That said, to a good approximation, all hardware is shitty. This has
> been true for many years, although it was not always so.

I blame Dell and the quest for the $400 PC. I don't know when's the
last time I grabbed a NIC and it felt like a solid piece of equipment
in my hand. Ya know, NICs used to last forever, operate at their full
throughput, and never require a moment's thought. You bought a NIC for
$40, stuck it in a box, and you never considered that it might fail.
Things like that didn't fail! Now, you buy one for $15, it had a third
of the components on it, might not even negotiate duplex correctly, and
will die without any warning tomorrow, or next year.

- --
It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise,
Than for a man to hear the song of fools.
Ecclesiastes 7:5
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