wireless help!

[aluminumspleen]

hey y'all!

so, i've got a nice minimal lenny install on an old 350mhz K6 with 192megs RAM. i'm trying to turn it into a small (and, yes, slow) file server of sorts. however, in order to do this, i need to get the wireless card working in it. it's a pci card, dynex wireless g, with a Broadcom BCM4318 chipset on it. i went looking for the drivers, and found it, along with the beginnings of an installation guide, here:
b43 - Linux Wireless
got the driver downloaded and installed, along with the firmware. however, then tried to get it working using ifconfig by turning it on, it went on but no internet. then tried using wpa_supplicant to get it to work, with the command

wpa_supplicant -iwlan0 -Dwext -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

but, there was no wpa_supplicant.conf file. tried creating one, didn't work. don't know what else to do. any ideas? let me know if you need me to print ifconfig or my wpa_supplicant.conf. thanks in advance!

[iwanabeguru]

Is your internte connection secrued by wpa-spk2?

If not , then there is no reason for using wpa-suplicant.

Load the driver and check that the interface exists.

Paste the output of "ifconfig -a" here

[aluminumspleen]

it's "wpa2 personal". (i read this off the wireless on my windows machine).

output from "ifconfig -a":

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:40:d0:07:b3:40
inet addr:192.168.0.99 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::240:d0ff:fe07:b340/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:28816 errors:58315 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:17567 errors:32 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:40878136 (38.9 MiB) TX bytes:1287560 (1.2 MiB)
Interrupt:10 Base address:0x2000

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:11336 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:11336 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:4033773 (3.8 MiB) TX bytes:4033773 (3.8 MiB)

wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:1c:df:52:c6:ee
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

wmaster0 Link encap:UNSPEC HWaddr 00-1C-DF-52-C6-EE-6C-6F-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)


what do you mean, "check if the interface exists"? i installed the driver, i think...it was the b43 driver i referenced above

[waterhead]

If you have wpa_supplicant installed, then there are some example config files in this folder:

/usr/share/doc/wpasupplicant/examples

Here is one for what I think your wireless network is:

# WPA-PSK/TKIP

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant

network={
    ssid="example wpa-psk network"
    key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
    proto=WPA
    pairwise=TKIP
    group=TKIP
    psk="secret passphrase"
}

You need to change the ssid= and psk= to your specific ones.

[aluminumspleen]

thanks to both of you for the replies (i forgot to say it in my last post )

i looked at the examples, and i think the one with wpa2 is the one, so i used it as my .config (after changing it with my network name and passphrase).

however, then when i try to run:
wpa_supplicant -iwlan0 -Dwext -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

i get an endless list of CTRL-EVENT-SCAN-RESULTS. I dunno if the list ever ends, it's just this on each line, and it's been chugging about 3-4 minutes now. did i do the right thing?

here's my wpa_supplicant.conf:

#WPA2-EAP/CCMP using EAP-TLS

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant

network={
     ssid="<my network name>"
     key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
     proto=WPA2
     pairwise=CCMP
     group=CCMP
     eap=TLS
     ca_cert="/etc/cert/ca.pem"
     private_key="/etc/cert/user.p12"
     private_key_passwd="<my network passphrase>"
}

looking back at it, i'm not exactly sure what "ca_cert" and "private key" are...

also, should this topic be in the networking folder instead of the debian one?

[waterhead]

Did you run this:

wpa_supplicant -iwlan0 -Dwext -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

on the new wpa_supplicant.conf file?

Also, read the man pages, it may provide some insight.

man wpa_supplicant

I'm not sure what those two entries are for either. Since the ca_cert points to a file, is there a file in that location? You can always comment out a line with the # symbol, and see if it works.

[Hal343]

Another possibility(I just got caught by this yesterday) I also had my router set up limited by mac address as well as wap2, and couldn't figure out why I couldn't connect a new machine to the network, until I went into the router to find out.