upgrade from fc4 to fc6 and now broadcomm 4306 not working
 

I had a broadcom 4306 wireless card working fine in fedora core 4 using ndiswrapper. Recently I upgraded to fc 6 (using anaconda updater) and then the wireless card would recieve error when I tried to activate using gui...unable to obtain ip...

what I've done so far....
installed latest version of ndiswrapper
blacklisted bcm43xx

ndiswrapper -l tells me driver installed and present

wlan0 still listed in network gui with all previous settings
Verified alias wlan0 ndiswrapper in both etc/*.conf files

dmesg lists card working fine.

iwconfig report ok, except AP: Invalid (using essid non-broadcast, so do not remember if this is normal)

AP and card do work, using them now to write this on windows boot.

Any suggestions? Anything else different to occur when upgraded to FC6

Thanks,

Tony

I would broadcast the SSID simply because it sometimes makes a difference and the security "boost" you get from not broadcasting it is a joke.

No, that's not OK. If it isn't finding the AP, then it is possible that the config is not correct. It would be helpful if you can post the output of iwconfig.

Also, check to make sure bcm43xx is NOT loaded (run lsmod and see if it is there). If the blacklist is failing for some reason, that might cause this problem.

Finally, when you installed ndiswrapper, did you do it from source or did you grab the latest RPM?

Thanks for the help. Not sure why, but finally got it working. Think that it had to do with the blacklist not reloading until I rebooted. Once that seemed to work, I was able to re-install ndiswrapper without too much difficulty and now everything seems to be working well.

Is there a specific reason why not broadcasting ESSID isn't that good of an idea? Is it still easy to scan for networks that are not broadcasting essid?

Thanks,

Tony

Yeah, unless you manually removed the module with modprobe, it isn't going to unload until a reboot. Just adding a module to the blacklist doesn't do anything by itself.

People seem to think that if they don't broadcast their SSID that their access point can't be found. That may be true for some of the trivial wireless scanning tools out there, but for the stuff that you have to worry about (like aircrack or kismet) not broadcasting your SSID does absolutely nothing. They can find you anyway. Instead you need to implement WPA encryption. If for some reason you can only use WEP, that is better than nothing and will keep the casual snooper out.

Some configurations have difficulty connecting when the SSID broadcast is disabled - WPA configs in particular.

Even with the SID broadcast off, you're still broadcasting. The AP or router simply transmits a null instead of a name field. Any wireless tool worth a damn will still see your network. The SSID will show up eventually, or can be forced to reveal itself with a probe request.

Anyone fooled by SSID broadcast disable was no threat to your network. :)

edit: Hangdog beat me. I need more coffee.