Setting up wifi in Suse 11.1 problems

[Jonny88]

Hi,
can anybody help
I have a wireless card built into my motherboard (ASUS M2N-32 SLi deluxe) it works fine in win xp but in linux I cannot get it to work. In XP I get 54mb/s and excellent signal strength. The router has a "blind" Site ID (but I know what the Site ID is) and wep encryption which is 13digits long. I tried to setup manually in yast but got no joy. I am now trying network manager and when I set up I get a purple cog that goes on for 3-4 minutes before giving up. When I try to reconnect through network manager I see the site ID followed by either a padlock or letter (to signify encryption I think) and a grey bar (signal strength?) with about 20% in blue (weak signal?) what am I doing wrong or what could I try as I assume the card is working in Linux (although I may be wrong)
Thanks
Jonny

[waterhead]

Hi,

More detailed information on your wireless may help us solve this problem. The site linked to below describes the info, and how to find it. You can run the script in the second part, and post the output here.

Wireless Setup - Start Here

[Jonny88]

Hi, the script would not run correctly on Suse but I think I've gathered the required info here:

[waterhead]

Thanks for the info. Just to recap, here it is:

The wireless card:

============ lsusb ============
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0bda:8187 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8187 Wireless Adapter

The driver, and other related modules:

============ lsmod ============
Module                  Size  Used by
rtl8187                45264  0 
mac80211              199864  1 rtl8187
eeprom_93cx6            2204  1 rtl8187
cfg80211               23380  2 rtl8187,mac80211
usbcore               165892  5 rtl8187,usbhid,ohci_hcd,ehci_hcd

The wireless connection, as your system sees it:

============ ifconfig ============
wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:15:AF:0B:FB:B8
          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)

============ iwconfig ============
wlan0     IEEE 802.11bg  ESSID:""
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.422 GHz  Access Point: Not-Associated
          Tx-Power=27 dBm
          Retry min limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr=2352 B
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:0  Signal level:0  Noise level:0
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

Everything looks OK. You should be having no problem connecting. You say that it is a "hidden" connection? This may be the reason for the problem. There really is no reason to hide a connection, because it offers little or no protection. To see if it can actually detect your network, run this command.

iwlist wlan0 scan

You also say that you are using WEP encryption. This offers lousy protection, and can easily be cracked. You should be using WEP-TKIP, at least. The one thing that using WEP is that you can use terminal commands to set the connection.

$ iwconfig --help
Usage: iwconfig [interface]
                interface essid {NNN|any|on|off}
                interface mode {managed|ad-hoc|master|...}
                interface freq N.NNN[k|M|G]
                interface channel N
                interface bit {N[k|M|G]|auto|fixed}
                interface rate {N[k|M|G]|auto|fixed}
                interface enc {NNNN-NNNN|off}
                interface key {NNNN-NNNN|off}
                interface power {period N|timeout N|saving N|off}
                interface nickname NNN
                interface nwid {NN|on|off}
                interface ap {N|off|auto}
                interface txpower {NmW|NdBm|off|auto}
                interface sens N
                interface retry {limit N|lifetime N}
                interface rts {N|auto|fixed|off}
                interface frag {N|auto|fixed|off}
                interface modulation {11g|11a|CCK|OFDMg|...}
                interface commit 
       Check man pages for more details.

To connect to a network named "Linux", you would first enter this:

iwconfig wlan0 essid Linux

Then, to enter the key:

iwconfig wlan0 key your-key-here

I think you get the idea, do this for everything you need to enter. Then check it again with just the iwconfig option, without any options.

EDIT: One thing that I forgot to mention.

In Suse, you need to go into YaST and configure the wireless card. I don't have any detailed instructions for this, so you may have to wing it.

[Jonny88]

Hi
I tried removing the hidden and it made no difference to being able to connect to the network, any other ideas?

[waterhead]

Did you try any of my other suggestions?

In YaST, make sure you tell it to use DHCP.

[Jonny88]

Running a scan seems to detect the network, although the SSID comes up with something like /x00 setting SSID works on command line, however setting the WEP key fails (I am using a 13 digit passkey)
Any ideas? Do I need madwifi or drivers or something? DHCP is on in yast, don't know how to check this with network manager, but neither ways seem to connect anyway so I don't think that is the problem

[Jonny88]

Just to point out, I have been able to set the key using the 26 digit hex figure instead but still I do not seem to be connected to the network

[waterhead]

Try using the SSID that the scan finds. This may have something to do with the problem.

[Jonny88]

I turned off the hidden and the SSID now scans as the correct SSID, when I use this it makes no difference, I am getting a quality of 14/100 and a signal of 65/65. No issues in windows with signal though