Anyone reading this on a German, Alice-provided WLAN connection?

I'm trying to help my friend, whose Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Pro V2000 is running Debian Etch. The wireless card comes from Intel, and normally works with ipw2200 (I had this laptop for several years, and never encountered wireless problems).

My friend is on a shared wireless connection ("Alice Fun Flat/ISDN"), which should basically be a normal WEP-encrypted thing as far as I've understood. Setting the essid and key and doing "ifup eth0" seems to go well: the computer gets an ip address and seems in all respects to be online. But it isn't. We can't get so much as a ping out of/into it.

The flatmates say the network is flaky, but working. They set everything up with an installation cd which only works with XP. There is talk of an id and password needed (but only one time, to run the installation cd), and some kind of "user name" (in fact the telephone number of the flat) which is set when they connect.

I've been reading up a bit on EAP and fiddling with wpa_supplicant, but I really have no clue as to whether or not I'm on the right track. Everything seems to work, but so far nothing does. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. You don't want my friend to hate Linux, do you?!

Kind regards,
--Simen

Personally for WEP protected networks I prefer the iwconfig suite of utilities over wpasupplicant, but that is just a preference. I am running on a thinkpad T42 with an ipw2200 card, and I connect to my WEP network without issue.

Even if the network were down, you should still be able to ping the local gateway with a 99.99% or better rate of success. The fact that you can't pass any pings could simply be that you have an iptables firewall up on the linux laptop, but it does seem to indicate some sort of issue with the network. Being able to get DHCP confuses me though, as that indicates the network configs are fine. Here is what I'd suggest -

Install the wireless tools package found here, if you don't already have access to the programs iwlist and iwconfig -
http://pcmcia-cs.sourceforge.net/ftp...ools.28.tar.gz

Then as root -
That assumes your laptop sees the wireless card as eth1, which it should as it has kernel support, but if you got it up with ndiswrapper it might be wlan0 or something else.

In any case, that should bring the wireless live, and see if you can ping you local router/gateway's address. If that works all is well from the wireless perspective. Also, you did create an entry for the wireless card in /etc/network/interfaces correct?

Peace,
JimBass

Thanks for the reply. I already use iwconfig etc. Its with these tools I get the "phantom connection". Reason I'm looking up wpa_config is because I think some additional identification is needed. Very unsure...

Regards,
--Simen

I can't say much for wpasupplicant, but I am certain you can connect to WEP with iwconfig. Here's another possibility - the firmware for the wireless card. Did you install that?

Peace,
JimBass