WPA Supplicant Question

brokenflea · 07-26-2005, 01:17 PM

i'm using the netgear wg511 v2 (made in taiwan) pc card. i have it configured fine with ndiswrapper accessing my wireless router. the encryption, though, its using is wep and i wanted to go with WPA.
so i installed wpa_supplicant and whenever i run

wpa_supplicant -Dndiswrapper -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -dd

this is the error i'm getting :

Initializing interface 'wlan0' conf '/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf' driver 'ndiswrapper'
Unsupported driver 'ndiswrapper'.

is anyone out there been able to use WPA successfully on this card and if there's a way to get this up and running i would really appreciate it. i'm also using a 2.6.10 kernel with the prism54 driver compiled in the kernel.

any help would be gladly appreciated.

TIA

chess · 07-27-2005, 05:58 AM

Why are you using ndiswrapper if your card uses prism54 driver? If your wifi card uses the native prism54 driver then doesn't that mean you don't need ndiswrapper?

I use ndiswrapper and wpa_supplicant on my dell 700m. How did you build wpa_supplicant? Did you include ndiswrapper or madwifi in your config file?

brokenflea · 07-27-2005, 07:54 PM

yeah, that's true. i have no clue why i'm using ndiswrapper. when i dmesg it tells me that the prism54 driver has been loaded but when i type in lspci as root, what it brings up is this:

Code:

01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell: Unknown device 1faa (rev 03)

so i'm assuming netgear support lied to me and told me that my card uses the prism chipset.

chess · 07-27-2005, 08:11 PM

if you do need to use ndiswrapper, then you need to enable that when you build wpa_supplicant in your wpa_suppliant .config file. I think the "Unsupported driver 'ndiswrapper'" message means that you didn't include ndiswrapper when you built wpa_supplicant. Not positive, but I think that's what that means.

brokenflea · 07-28-2005, 06:42 PM

thanks for your info. i recompiled wpa_supplicant again and it started working. the only other question i have is, initially my AP had broadcast ssid disabled and wpa_supplicant didn't work with it being disabled, but when i enabled it, it started working. is there anyway i can have the ssid broadcast disabled but still have wpa working on my network..

TIA

chess · 07-28-2005, 07:33 PM

Yes, there is. I had this same problem, but Jouni, the wpa_supplicant developer, pointed me in the right direction. Turns out it was sort of buried in the commented wpa_supplicant.conf example that is found on the wpa_supplicant site.

What you need to do is specify the encryption algorithm and the group setting variables in the wpa_supplicant.conf file. You can get your encryption algorithm from your router. You also need to add ap_scan=2. So, for example, my wpa_supplicant.conf file looks like this:

ap_scan=2
network={
ssid="myessid"
scan_ssid=1
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
pairwise=TKIP
group=TKIP
psk="myencryptionkey"
}

I had to use TKIP on my router instead of CCMP/AES since I also have an older Apple iBook with does not support CCMP, only TKIP. But, wpa now works great with my essid broadcast disabled.

HTH.

chess · 07-28-2005, 07:38 PM

I should say that the encryption algorithm and the group setting have to be the same, so if you use CCMP, then both the pairwise and the group_id setting would both be "CCMP" instead of "TKIP".

here is the text from the sample wpa_supplicant.conf file that gives you the answer (this is near the top in the discussion on the ap_scan variable:

Code:

# AP scanning/selection
# By default, wpa_supplicant requests driver to perform AP scanning and then
# uses the scan results to select a suitable AP. Another alternative is to
# allow the driver to take care of AP scanning and selection and use
# wpa_supplicant just to process EAPOL frames based on IEEE 802.11 association
# information from the driver.
# 1: wpa_supplicant initiates scanning and AP selection
# 0: driver takes care of scanning, AP selection, and IEEE 802.11 association
#    parameters (e.g., WPA IE generation); this mode can also be used with
#    non-WPA drivers when using IEEE 802.1X mode; do not try to associate with
#    APs (i.e., external program needs to control association). This mode must
#    also be used when using wired Ethernet drivers.
# 2: like 0, but associate with APs using security policy and SSID (but not
#    BSSID); this can be used, e.g., with ndiswrapper and NDIS drivers to
#    enable operation with hidden SSIDs and optimized roaming; in this mode,
#    the network blocks in the configuration file are tried one by one until
#    the driver reports successful association; each network block should have
#    explicit security policy (i.e., only one option in the lists) for
#    key_mgmt, pairwise, group, proto variables
ap_scan=1

brokenflea · 07-28-2005, 09:18 PM

thanks again for your info, it seems to be working fine. i hate to bombard you with problems, but every once in a while like 8-9 seconds the network card seems to drop the connection and picks it up again. any idea what this might be.

Thanks again for all your help, i really apprecaite it.

--EDIT----

The router just needed a firmware upgrade. Its fixed!!! and works great. Thanks again for all your help! I really appreciate it