How to enter my WEP key?

No i didnt solve it, i been trying to get this for about 3 hours now and still no luck

I can connect and work fine with my AP with no WEP enabled so everything is working there.

But when i enable WEP

Here is the situation

If i set my WEP mode on the AP to 128bit Automatic and i type in the passphrase "testing" (without the quotes) and it generates the WEP key "9B70F45B07F513B71B042F8509" how do i apply that to my network setup?? Usually in my windows setup i just go to my network setup and select that its 128bit encryption and i would type in "testing" as the passphrase and it auto generates the WEP key and it connects fine.

I have tried these but they dont seem to work for me

iwconfig wlan0 key s:testing
iwconfig wlan0 key 9B70F45B07F513B71B042F8509

I've tried to use both of those settings and neither of them work, i read a bunch of other posts about this and i think what im doing is suppose to be working???

Any help will be welcomed

bump: i had edited this to say i had solved the issue but i still need help

This is how mine works:

iwconfig wlan0 essid NAME
iwconfig wlan0 mode Managed
iwconfig wlan0 channel 7
iwconfig wlan0 key 12345678909876543212345678 (26 characters)

Maybe you are not entering the right channel? or omitting the mode?

here's a tip, open another console window and run iwevent in that new window. You can then double check any iwconfig commands you type in the first console window are being accepted. This is useful if you, like me, have a daemon or another process resetting your iwconfig commands and wondering why none of your iwconfig commands work.

thanks for the tip, that would have been really handy yesterday had i know about that

I have a Belkin f5d700 card installed and recognised with ndiswrapper 0.8. It works fine with security off but I cannot get 128bit WEP working. In Windows XP (through the Belkin utility) I just type in the 26 characters and am good to go. Taking cck23's suggestion, I got the following 3 lines in the iwevent window:
21:47:12.008534 wlan0 Encryption key:****-****-****-****-****-****-** Security modepen
21:47:13.491875 wlan0 Encryption keyff
21:47:13.491934 wlan0 ESSIDff/any
So something did reset it.
What is doing it? And how do I stop it?

This is my first post so please let me know if there isn't enough info here.

if you wish to reset your wep key and set your essid for your lan card, you will need to type this command


log in as root then type this

>iwconfig wlan0 essid "essid here"
>iwconfig wlan0 key on
>iwconfig wlan0 key 12345678901234567890123456

of course substitute the above key command for your own key

then type

>dhclient wlan0



then see how you go


(also please remove all the "" from the essid comman)

hope this helps

Aliyoung,

looks like you had exactly the same problem as me, when you type in your iwconfig, you should only get one line in iwevent, you are getting three like me and like you i at first could not get it to work with wep switched on. Right now, i have to leave for work but will post my resolution when i get in the office, in the meanwhile, please post your linux distribution and version here please

CCK

Ok - hello again,

I see that you are using Mandrake from your profile...I am using Mdk 10 as well so hopefully this will help:

I found that when i inserted my card or when I used iwconfig commands the following script was being run (you can add your own debug to this script to confirm this):

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-wireless

if you look at this script you will see that it looks for the existence of the iwconfig command and if it does exist it will perform some iwconfig commands e.g. iwconfig open, iwconfig essid any etc...

In my case, the reason that key was always "off" and essid was also set to Any was because at the time the script was run, certain variables didn't exisit.

To get around this i discovered that the /etc/sysconfig/network was being read...so the magic solution for me was to set my /etc/sysconfig/network file as follows:

NETWORKING=yes
KEY=1234567890
ESSID=myNetwork

I also modified the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-wireless very slightly, you might not need this but I changed the line:

iwconfig $DEVICE key $KEY

to the following:

iwconfig $DEVICE key open $KEY

Now my wireless cards flawlessly, with the excpetion if I use MAC Address restrictions at the router then for some reason dhclient wlan0 seems to take much longer, so i have switch that off at the router.


Good luck and please let us know how it goes, I might extracts of this to WiKi if it works for you as it would be nice to know if it's a general issue and might apply to others.

CCK

Thanks both,
I will try it out and hopefully post success.
Ali.

Originally posted by cck23 Ok - hello again, I see that you are using Mandrake from your profile...I am using Mdk 10 as well so hopefully this will help: I found that when i inserted my card or when I used iwconfig commands the following script was being run (you can add your own debug to this script to confirm this): /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-wireless if you look at this script you will see that it looks for the existence of the iwconfig command and if it does exist it will perform some iwconfig commands e.g. iwconfig open, iwconfig essid any etc... In my case, the reason that key was always "off" and essid was also set to Any was because at the time the script was run, certain variables didn't exisit. To get around this i discovered that the /etc/sysconfig/network was being read...so the magic solution for me was to set my /etc/sysconfig/network file as follows: NETWORKING=yes KEY=1234567890 ESSID=myNetwork I also modified the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-wireless very slightly, you might not need this but I changed the line: iwconfig $DEVICE key $KEY to the following: iwconfig $DEVICE key open $KEY Now my wireless cards flawlessly, with the excpetion if I use MAC Address restrictions at the router then for some reason dhclient wlan0 seems to take much longer, so i have switch that off at the router. Good luck and please let us know how it goes, I might extracts of this to WiKi if it works for you as it would be nice to know if it's a general issue and might apply to others. CCK

that info is really really handy to have, if i had that info when i was setting my network up...things would have been sooooo much easier, i tried to find out where the card was getting its settings from but no one could give me the right info, this would be relaly helpfull to alot of people if it was posted somehwere......the amount opeople that i read saying that their card looses its settings on start, i usually just redirect to /etc/rc.local but this is more of a "proper" way

thanks for the info

Hi Stuart

I think adding iwconfig commands and dhcpd/dhclient commands to /etc/rc.local is fine, I even do that myself. The problem addressed by modifying ifup-wireless and the network file were really only needed by me and perhaps some other people when I noticed like aliyoung that when I did enter my iwconfig commands, something else was also automatically resetting my settings. Adding them to ifup-wireless and network config got around that.

Yeah thats cool, but i also had EXACTLY the same issues with my card when i was trying to use ndiswrapper, i never got it going, the only way i ended up getting it working was using the linuxant driver(which worked perfectly) however in 19 days they want me to pay $20 for a license to keep using it so i might uninstall it and try ndiswrapper again with this method.

Hello again all (and stuart )

I have actually been docuemting my experiences in the WiKi section of linuxquestions in the hope that all the hours (literally spent 4 days trying to understand what was going on, which included a re-install of mdk 10) and hope that other prospective linux wireless users do not go through the agony that I went through:

http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Wireless_networking

Now, I am the first to admin that i am not the best writer but i hope to include the key points.

Hope it goes well for you and all

CCK

F A N T A S T I C ! ! !

I can connect to my wireless network with 128bit WEP encryption!

I followed the instructions from the INSTALL file in ndiswrapper-0.8 but my iwconfig commands didn't seem to work.

I started iwevent in another window.

When I typed `iwconfig wlan0 key 123123123123123`, I got additional commands in iwevent resetting 'essid to off/any' and 'encryption to off'.

I then added the following 2 lines to the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0:

KEY=123123123123123
ESSID=belkin54g

Then, when I retried the iwconfig command, there was just that one command in the iwevent window.

Then joy of joys, I could ping my router and access it's config at 192.168.2.1.

I ran the last instruction from INSTALL `ndiswrapper -m` and now my network is available on reboot.

Thanks to cck23 and stuart for their posts on this thread, I am a happy bunny :-)