Cannot set ESSID with iwconfig
 

Hello Guys,

I have a Dell 600m laptop with an Intel Centrino 2100 wireless card. I successfully compiled ndiswrapper and was able to get the wireless card detected and "running" in linux (as far as the driver goes).

However, when it comes to configuring my card for my wirless network, I *cannot* get iwconfig to set my SSID! Everything else works... changing channels, setting up the WEP key, etc, but not the SSID!

Here is the command I'm running:
I've also tried it without quotes and with several other network names... nothing.

Everytime I type:

I see:

wlan0 IEEE 802.11b ESSID:""
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412GHz Access Point: FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF
Bit Rate:54Mb/s
RTS thr:1600 B Fragment thr:2344 B
Encryption key:8384-1E3F-03B9-7EA4-08F9-xxxx-xx Security mode:restricted
Power Management:off
Link Quality:0/100 Signal level:-98 dBm Noise level:-256 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

What am I doing wrong?

I am on Fedora Core 2 with 2.6.5-1.358 as my kernel (whatever comes with FC2).

Thanks!
Andrew

Also - I've tried to change settings with the card both up (ifconfig wlan0 up) and down, and still nothing... I'm doing all of the commands with the root accont (su -).

it says link quality 0/100
i would be more worried about that at the moment

what wireless router do you have?

Thanks for the quick response. I have a Linksys BEFW11S4 router.

http://www.linuxant.com/pipermail/dr...q4/000153.html

I just found this...... seems like a common problem :( Now where is the solution?!

I've seen a couple of examples of cards not being able to set the SSID unless the router was broadcasting it. If your router isn't broadcasting the SSID, you might try turning that on and see if it helps.

I don't think that you need quotes around your ESSID, for instance mine is set like this:

iwconfig wlan0 essid RAGEKAGE

Try that and see if it works :)

i have that exact same router with my current wireless linux setup.
for now, i just have it on the default settings and it works fine. i was playing with the settings, and had turned SSID broadcast off (just to see if the laptop would still work), restarted the computer, and it didn't work. it couldn't find anything (even if i specified correct the ssid on the laptop).. as soon as i turned ssid broadcast back on it worked fine.

I am also having a similar problem with being unable to set the essid (and the access point MAC).
I'm using a Belkin 802.11G PCI card (f5d7000) through ndiswrapper and a Belkin 802.11B router. I do have "Broadcast SSID'" enabled in the router configuration.
I'm running Mandrake 10, with the default 2.6.3-7 kernel.
Here is the output of "iwconfig wlan0" (after setting the encryption key)
(update)
According to this page, the SSID will show correctly when the device is up, but this did not fix the problem for me.

It's usually easy to edit the etc /sysconfig/network file. Find the entry for wlan0 or whatever the one you are using is.


Incidentally set the network card from the config panel -- you need to set the ip address, dsn servers, and gateway just like with a normal network card as well. I'm doing mine manually since I don't have a DHCP server. Once you've set these then when you do IWCONFIG you'll find the stuff already set.

im having the exact same issue guys, i have no wep key set on my AP(for testing purposes that is) and it works fine with windows but when i get into linux it seems to not work,

iwconfig brings this

wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:""
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.462GHz Access Point: FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF
Bit Rate:54Mb/s Tx-Power:16 dBm
RTS thr:2347 B Fragment thr:2346 B
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality:100/100 Signal level:-10 dBm Noise level:-256 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0


i have link quality 100 as my AP is right next to the laptop at the moment, but no matter what i do i cant change the ESSID, im using mandrake 10 official with ndiswrapper 8.0 to get my card running. its a belkin AP. same as you guys i set the essid "iwconfig wlan0 essid "idhere" and it appears to set it but it doesnt work :(

i hope we can work out a fix for this, where is the file to set the settings in manually? im a pretty linux nook and dont know where to look for it


i dunno if this helps, but when i run dhcpcd i get this

[root@home stu]# dhcpcd.exe: interface eth0 has been configured with old IP=192.168.0.5
dhcpcd wlan0
[root@home stu]# /etc/dhcpc/dhcpcd.exe: line 27: .: filename argument required
.: usage: . filename

@dinojerm : how did you manage make your Belkin atapter work with Mandrake 10? Did you have to pick a driver from the net and compile it ? Or is a driver embedded with the Mandrake10 distro ?

I used NdisWrapper . It lets you use (some) wireless adapters with their windows drivers. Mandrake 10 does come with a version of it, but it is only version 0.4. I uninstalled it and installed 0.8 from the source (You will also need to install the kernel source to install it). You will also need the .inf and the .sys driver files, available from the cd that came with the card. It should be compatible with the f5d7000 (except for this problem).

Hey guys,
I had noticed a similar problem with the essid, i'm using slackware 10.0 and NDISwrapper. I noticed that if you don't set the encryption key first then you won't be able to connect to the network.

so has anyone had any luck fixinf this problem yet?

WOOHOO I FIXED IT!!!!!!

I was having the exact same trouble as you guys, i was using ndiswrapper 0.8 on my asus laptop which has an asus wireless card that uses the broadcom BCM94306 chipset. I went to the ndiswrapper site, and on their site they had two links to drivers for my chipset there so i got them and thats what i was using, the card would detect ok, and it would get signal to the AP but nothing else, i coudnt change anything like ESSID or when i tried to run dhcpcd it would give me errors, anyways the reason i didnt use the driver that came with my card was that it was in a windows installer package and i didnt know what to get from the installed windows sytem to use with the linux install. I was looking in my program files folder and noticed an asus folder there so i had a look and it had drivers for my card for win98, winME, win2k and winXP. I tried the XP one but it seemed to do nothing so i had a look at the inf and it was all garbled data and i couldnt read it in anythign in linux so i had a look at the ME/98 drivers and they were fine so i tried to install one of those and VOILA!! on next reboot my card detected my AP and here i am typing this over my wireless link.

It was the same named file that i got from the ndiswrapper site(bcmwl5a.inf), just the contents of mine were slightly different

The laptop is the ASUS L5000GA


So to summarise

Ndiswrapper 0.8 with Broadcom BCM94306 chipset and the generic driver that comes from the ndiswrapper site for that chipset did not work for me and i had to use the driver that came with my card(which i didnt do in the first place because i couldnt find it)

I hope this info can help you guys out, and maybe you can try some different driver files and see if they work?? (you didnt post wether you were using the windows driver that came with your card or if you were using one from ndiswrapper site)

Hmmm.... When I first modprobe ndiswrapper, it does automatically display a network name and MAC addrfess. Since since the ssid was just "linksys", I assumed that it was the default for the drivers.
Then, with Windows, I used NetStumbler and found that that "linksys" network did exist and had the MAC that was listed by iwconfig (It is probably owned by a neighbor). Its signal strength was low, and was rarely accesible (otherwise I would just use their network). It wasn't encrypted (mine is).
I think I will try to disable encryption and see if that helps.

dinojerm im seeing exactly the same thing as you using mandrake 10, i have the card set to start on bootup ( i did that via system>>configuration>>configure your computer>>network and internet>>manage connections then i choose my wlan0 card goto options and set to start on boot) however when i set it to that, it would always pick up my neighbours AP as well and connect. The way i stopped that is by going to that same configuration panel and settings manually under wireless settings the ESSID to my ESSID "WLAN" now it boots up fine and starts the network on boot and connects to my AP.

However when i turn it off start on boot and try to set my ESSID manually by using "iwconfig wlan0 essid WLAN" it still wont set it there, the only way i can get it to load up again is to "modprobe -r ndiswrapper" then start it again. However it doesnt get an IP address when i do this manually, and when i try to run dhcpcd it just hangs the terminal, i cant seem to get an IP address for my card any other way but to have it load on bootup.

So i can get it to work that way without encyption also. I had problems with encryption enabled, i couldnt get it to connect but im just ironing that issue out now.

I dunno if this will be helpfull at all but i just thoguth id let you know my experience.

Hey Guys..

I (finally) solved my problems by recompiling my kernel to the latest (2.6.7) and then installing the ipw2100 drivers (http://ipw2100.sf.net) instead of using the ndiswrapper. It took quite a bit more work than the ndiswrapper, but it works.

For anyone wondering (anyone else with an Intel 2100 Wireless card on FC2), here is what I did:

1. Download/extract latest kernel source from http://kernel.org (updating the kernel fixed errors when I tried to 'make' the ipw2100 driver)

2. Recompile your kernel (I followed this tutorial for reference: http://fedoranews.org/contributors/vitor_domingos/ntfs/)

3. Reboot with new kernel

4. Download/extract latest ipw2100 drivers from http://ipw2100.sf.net

5. Refer to "Building Internal" in the INSTALL file to build the drivers directly into the kernel:
http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net/INSTALL

6. When configuring the kernel (make menuconfig), enable the ipw2100 driver and enable legacy firmware support (I couldn't seem to get hotplug firmware working). There is more information on this in the INSTALL file.

7. Recompile the kernel once again just as before

8. Reboot to the new kernel. On boot-up, my system detected the 'new hardware' and I was able to configure it for DHCP.

9. Now you can go ahead and configure your network card once you get back into linux ... (I did this through System Tools > Network Device Control) on the main menu.

10. After configuring, try to pull up an IP using ifup eth1 (or similar) in the terminal as root. And that should be it!

Hopefully these instructions help anyone else out there. Again, this is just what I found worked for me... I'm a complete linux n00b, so maybe there is an easier way...

The SSID problem seems pretty common so hopefully this thread is proving useful to quite a few people!

When I disabled encryption, I was able to connect (though I set the SSID in /etc/rc.d/rc.local so it would do it every time it booted).
Then, once the SSID was set, I reenabled encryption on the router and with iwconfig.
This worked to get the network setup, but I don't want to have to do this every time I restart.

Thats exactly where im at now dinojerm, i can get my network to start on bootup if i have WEP disabled, then i can enable WEP on the AP and then go and put the key in with iwconfig for the card, but yeah i dont want to do this every time either.


Does anyone know where the config file is for the network settings? I'm guessing that when i do a iwconfig it gets that info from somewhere??

I don't know if this helps, but I just have a series of modprobe and iwconfig commands in my /etc/rc.d/rc.local file. As for iwconfig, it is getting the information from your card information directory of /proc/net. Since /proc changes all the time, this isn't a stable place to try and store configs.

If it helps, this is the relevant section of my rc.local:

Yep that is what SHOULD work, and i should be able to do that from the command prompt but it just wants to be stubborn. I tried with the linuxant drivers and my card detects fine, all commands work fine and there is no issues anymore, the problem appears to lie with ndiswrapper, as im using the exact same windows drivers with the linuxant program as well. It's a shame as linuxant only allows me to use it for 30 days then wants me to buy a license for $20 US, im gonna go look tomorrow at a shop and see how much a new wireless card is gonna cost me, and decide if i want to buy a 20$ license for my card or a new card.


http://www.linuxant.com/driverloader...3d4697b0f06e06

for those who might be interested, you have to sign up for a trial account even but its 30 days and a good way to test your card. I'm giving up on ndiswrapper for now as ive spent the entire day trying to get it to work and am unable to get it to work with wep and i wont run without it enabled so :( for now.

Stuart: I've also decided to use the Linuxant driver loader instead of ndiswrapper. It seems to be working fine.

There is a message in the ndiswrapper forums on sourceforge that suggests switching your mode to Auto if you are having trouble setting your ESSID in ndiswrapper 0.8. The author claims (without any additional info) that setting the ESSID doesn't work in Managed mode, only in Auto and (apparently) has only used a Broadcom chipset, but it might be worth a go.

The post is here

<edit>
After a bit more rummaging around the Sourceforge forums, this appears to be the reccommended solution (well, if you have a Broadcom chipset that is) and using Auto shouldn't cause trouble with a Managed mode AP. If anyone has success with this approach, please post.

</edit>

Thanks for the info, but i have decided to bite the bullet and just purchase a license for linuxant driver loader(i really don't like the idea of paying to get a piece of hardware working but everything else is free so bleh..). I really need this to work properly as i'm trying to change from windows 100% and this was really the last step and i needed my wireless to behave properly so i can reconfig it easily for different networks and with the linuxant driver it works perfectly for this.

but still thanks for looking for the info :)

I've been setting up a WMP54G (rev2.7) throughout most of the evening. I can't illustrate how frustrating it's been to run into necessary configuration tools that weren't part of the "default" install for Mandrake 10. Throughout the course of tonight I've upgraded the kernel to 2.7 and installed I don't know how many additional modules in order to pull this off. With ndiswrapper in place, I'm rather impressed with the work of these developers. :^) I see the last post here pretty well covers the generic approach, but I noticed there's a definite order to the progression of configurations.

In order to set the essid (actually, it was picked up) I had to make sure that the proper channel was being used (double-check your frequencies) and set up the key before it would be recognized. After those two were in place, it gathered the essid automatically, though it didn't take an IP until told by dhclient.

-----

On a related note, I have things set up well enough that I can configure them on a reboot, but I haven't been able to get it automated. I still have to set the key, change the channel, and retrieve an IP. Mandrake's Control Panel tells won't let me configure an internet connection (tells me I don't have a connection set up and should run the Internet Connection from the Control Panel... duh), and the nic setup under the same area doesn't include the driver in its list (since I'm utilizing ndiswrapper) so whatever additional edits the GUI would normally make have not been done. Anyone have an idea what files I need to look in to set this up for loading correctly at boot?

/etc/rc.local

Login as root and edit that file.

I just go right to the bottom and then add the commands that you have to issue manually to have them run on bootup


example

iwconfig wlan0 essid ¨myid here¨
iwconfig wlan0 key ¨my key here¨
dhclient wlan0


etc, thats what i did anyways, worked a treat

hope this helps

All,
I also have fixed this problem. I run mandrake 10 on my PC with a wireless card which contains a Broadcom chipset: Broadcom Corporation|BCM94306 802.11g NIC [NETWORK_OTHER]

I have first removed ndiswrapper 0.8 on my PC and have installed the last version 0.9
I have downloaded the driver from the Compaq site BCMWL5A. I am not sure if this is really part of the solution, but it works for me.
I have also to setup the wlan0 parameter in a certain order:

351 iwconfig mode auto
352 iwconfig wlan0 essid myessid channel 11
354 iwconfig wlan0 mode auto
356 iwconfig wlan0 key my_key

The key has to be set in the last step. Otherwise, it seems to be impossible to set it.
And finally, it works ...

[root@localhost vincent]# iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"my_ap"
Mode:Auto Frequency:2.462GHz Access Point: 00:0C:41:DE:0C:E7
Bit Rate:54Mb/s Tx-Power:25 dBm
RTS thr:2347 B Fragment thr:2346 B
Encryption key: my_key Security mode:restricted
Power Management:off
Link Quality:99/100 Signal level:-57 dBm Noise level:-256 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:78 Invalid misc:264 Missed beacon:0

Do not hesitate to ask for more informations ...

Vincent

My solution to the broadcom essid problem was just to change the drivers out. The card is identified by lspci as: 0000:02:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 03).(pcmcia 54g card) it is branded as a belkin F5D7010. when i used the drivers from the cd, with the ndiswrapper i could only change the ssid when i had the mode set to auto (iwconfig wlan0 mode auto.... then iwconfig wlan0 essid myessid). However this did not seem to work with my router very well and since i don't broadcast my essid this was also a problem. I have the drivers for a belkin F5D7000 pci card as I also have a wireless on a desktop. So used the drivers from that card (ndiswrapper -i ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf), and from what i can tell, all the features work, including changing mode, channel, and essid. Hope that helps someone.

NDISWRAPPER_VERSION=0.12

:)

Hi All,

I have seen this before and had it recently with a Linksys WPC54G using ndiswrappers. The card was configured as wlan0 and had channel set as auto. It had worked at one stage but after that was picking the wrong frequency. Once I set the channel to match the AP it all worked fine.

Hope that helps.

Hello everyone,

I've been encountering similar problems lately, and came across this thread. However, in my case it is slightly worse. I have the Linksys WMP54G with the Raylink 2500 chipset. I have installed ndiswrapper (a relatively new version, I downloaded it a few months ago) and run modprobe, and everything looks fine. However, I can't set any parameters using iwconfig. Currently, the essid is listed as "off/any" and the mode is managed. I cannot change the mode, set the essid, set the key, anything. Any ideas?

Thanks,

Jeremiah

Rt2500
 

Could you tell us what distribution you are running? The kernel version and the results of lspci would also be useful.

I am running Suse 10.1, kernel 2.6.16.13-4. I ran lspci, and the output was rather large. Is there something in particular that you want to know, or should I post the entire transcript?

When I do ndiswrapper -l, it says that hardware and driver are present and installed. The module is loaded, and iwconfig wlan0 shows the configuration, with ESSID=any/off, and MODE=auto. I cannot change either of these. I have tried configuring Network Devices through Yast, but I think I must be doing something there because that has even less success than iwconfig.

Also, when I do iwlist wlan0 scan, it finds the network I am trying to connect to, but says the signal strength is 0/100. I know this is not true, because I am using that network right now in Windows (dual boot).

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Jeremiah

I would like to see the lines that say network. So if you want a smaller output you can just run lspci | grep network.

My output looks something like this 02:02.0 Network controller: RaLink RT2500 802.11g .

The reason I ask is because there may be a better way to get your card up and running if you have an identical chip in your card. If you have this same chipset then you could use the drivers from this http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Downloads site. I've been using the drivers from this site in both 32bit and 64 bit systems for almost 2 years. They are rock solid and don't drop my connection like my windows drivers do. This would allow you to get away from using ndiswrapper if at all possible. ndiswrapper should only be used as a last resort as it can cause some serious stability issues to the kernel. I am currently using Debian as my distribution, but I believe last time I used Suse I was able to get the drivers source code as an RPM and setup the drivers easily.

I hope this will give you more options.

Thanks for the advice. I do have that same chipset, and I actually have tried to install the drivers myself, but ran into trouble. I have been trying to use ndiswrapper on a friend's laptop with broadcom 4318 chipset, and have had some (limited) success, so I thought I'd try that on my desktop at home. However, I would prefer to use the native drivers if possible.

The problem I had before was with compiling the driver. As I recall, there were different instructions for kernel version 2.4.x and 2.6.x, and since I have 2.6.16.13-4, I used the latter. One of the arguments for make was the path to the kernel, which I gave, but I always got an error about a missing file. I don't remember the exact syntax now; I will look up that information and post the commands I entered as well as the output as soon as possible.

Thanks again,

Jeremiah

So last night I downloaded the newest Linux drivers for the Ralink RT2500 chipset. I tried to follow the instructions for compiling in the readme, but I got the same errors as before. The readme says:

So I typed:
,

and the output was:
This was followed by a bunch of other warnings and errors as make apparently couldn't find what it was looking for.

So my question is, did I enter the command wrong, or am I missing files in my kernel source (or something else)?

Thanks,

Jeremiah

WOOHOO!!!! I am writing this post via my very own wireless connection. I was finally able to install the driver, rather than using ndiswrapper. However, I did not use the ones from the Ralink website; instead, I got downloaded the driver from http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/rt2500-cvs-daily.tar.gz. I also found a page which was very helpful in the installation process http://linux.wordpress.com/2006/05/1...-rt2500-wi-fi/, though I think the readme with this driver set would work just as well. After compiling the driver and inserting the module, I had to configure the card, which I did through the network card in Yast. After that I rebooted, and the device was brought up when Linux started. I still couldn't connect to the internet, even though I could see and connect to the network, so I ran "dhcpcd wlan0". I've been online ever since.

So the moral of the story is, if you have the Linksys WMP54G (or other wireless card based on the Ralink RT2500 chipset), you're much better off using the native Linux drivers than trying to get ndiswrapper to work. Furthermore, if you are running Suse 10.1, it seems that the drivers on the Ralink website might not work, so use the ones from serialmonkey.

Thanks to everyone who gave me advice.

Jeremiah

module problem
 

I had the same problem. I compiled the linux drivers coming with my WLan card, but they wouldn't let me change the ESSID and had other problems too.

When I switched to a different driver from serial monkey (http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/) I could solve this, set ESSID and connect to my Access Point.

So another source for this problem apparently is a module not working 100%. Try a different module, if you can, that should help!

vilwarin