WEP not working on FC3

chris8109964 · 12-10-2004, 10:21 AM

Ok, I am back again and trying a different wirless card in my Laptop. I still cannot connect to my wireless AP when WEP is enabled.

My hardware is...
Compaq Armada E500 Laptop (PIII, 700 MHz)
Cisco Systems 350 Series PCMCIA wireless NIC (using latest firmware)
3COM 8200 Series Enterprise Access Point

My Software is...
Fedora Core 3 / Windows 98 SE dual boot

Under Windows using the most recent Cisco tools I can connect without a problem by setting up a shared static 128-bit hex wep key profile.

Under Fedora it refuses to connect.

So here is some output that may help...

[root@localhost ~]# iwlist eth1 scan
eth1 Scan completed :
Cell 01 - Address: 00:0A:5E:08:9A:14
ESSID:"Goldsmith Wireless LAN"
Mode:Master
Frequency:2.437GHz (Channel 6)
Quality:0/160 Signal level=-77 dBm Noise level=-256 dBm
Encryption key

n
Bit Rate:1Mb/s
Bit Rate:2Mb/s
Bit Rate:5.5Mb/s
Bit Rate:11Mb/s

so, it can see the access point!

[root@localhost ~]# iwconfig eth1
eth1 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"Goldsmith Wireless LAN"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.432GHz Access Point: FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF
Bit Rate=11Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm Sensitivity=0/65535
Retry limit:16 RTS thr

ff Fragment thr

ff
Encryption key:****-****-****-****-****-****-** Security mode

pen
Power Management

ff
Link Quality=0/160 Signal level=-114 dBm Noise level=-114 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:13156 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:6143 Missed beacon:0

So, I see a few things here...

Why is the Access Point MAC coming back as FF:FF....?
Security mode: open should probably be 'restricted' but I have tried that to no avail.
Although the key is masked it appears to be in the correct format and was assigned in the GUI network tool with the 0x prefix.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks in advance, Chris

chris8109964 · 12-13-2004, 12:29 PM

This is the second time I have tried to get some kind of answer regarding 128 Bit WEP in Fedora Core. With two different wireless cards. So maybe I'll take another approach... Does anyone have a Cisco 350 series card working with 128 Bit WEP in any version of Linux? If so please please please tell me how you did it.

Thanks, Chris.

snecklifter · 12-13-2004, 02:09 PM

Hello chrislotsofnumbers,

Sorry to hear of your predicament. I'm assuming you can connect without encryption. When you set up the key you need to enter it in the format

Code:

iwconfig eth1 key restricted XXXXXXXX

rather than setting the key and then security mode.
What happens when you try to obtain an IP address using

Code:

dhclient eth1

?

Try not to stress. All your hardware is working by the sounds of it. Its just a case of playing around a bit with the settings. Use the dhclient eth1 command after each alteration to see if it talks to your AP. If it does then you need to look at other options but we'll see how you go with the above first.
Regards
Chris

chris8109964 · 12-14-2004, 10:22 AM

Thanks for the reply!
I will be able to try your suggestions and post the results later today I hope. In the meantime, can I confirm that the key, which is 26 Hex characters, is simply entered as

Code:

iwconfig eth1 key restricted XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

without any leading '0x' or any '-' in the middle? I assume it is NOT case sensitive in the case of hex A-F?

Chris...

snecklifter · 12-14-2004, 12:31 PM

As far as I know it is case sensitive. You will be wanting to use capitals. I'm not sure what version of wireless tools you are running on fedora however I note the following was fixed in version 26

Fix bugs in parsing encryption keys and setting encryption on in iwconfig

You may wish to look this up as well.

Code:

iwconfig -v

should give you this info.
Regards
Chris

chris8109964 · 12-15-2004, 09:05 AM

Ok, I have tried the suggestions so far and here are the results...

Code:

[root@localhost ~]# iwconfig -v
iwconfig  Wireless-Tools version 27
          Compatible with Wireless Extension v11 to v17.

Kernel    Currently compiled with Wireless Extension v16.

eth1      Recommend Wireless Extension v12 or later,
          Currently compiled with Wireless Extension v16.

wifi0     Recommend Wireless Extension v12 or later,
          Currently compiled with Wireless Extension v16.

Code:

[root@localhost ~]# iwlist eth1 scan
eth1      Scan completed :
          Cell 01 - Address: 00:0A:5E:08:9A:14
                    ESSID:"Goldsmith Wireless LAN"
                    Mode:Master
                    Frequency:2.437GHz (Channel 6)
                    Quality:0/160  Signal level=-49 dBm  Noise level=-256 dBm
                    Encryption key:on
                    Bit Rate:1Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:2Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:5.5Mb/s
                    Bit Rate:11Mb/s

Code:

[root@localhost ~]# iwconfig eth1
eth1      IEEE 802.11-DS  ESSID:"Goldsmith Wireless LAN"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.437GHz  Access Point: FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF
          Bit Rate=11Mb/s   Tx-Power=20 dBm   Sensitivity=0/65535
          Retry limit:16   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:****-****-****-****-****-****-**   Security mode:restricted
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=0/160  Signal level=-114 dBm  Noise level=-86 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:2321  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:2484   Missed beacon:0

Code:

[root@localhost ~]# dhclient eth1
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client V3.0.1
Copyright 2004 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/products/DHCP

wifi0: unknown hardware address type 801
sit0: unknown hardware address type 776
wifi0: unknown hardware address type 801
sit0: unknown hardware address type 776
Listening on LPF/eth1/00:0b:be:ed:67:0f
Sending on   LPF/eth1/00:0b:be:ed:67:0f
Sending on   Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 8
DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 11
DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 21

[2]+  Stopped                 dhclient eth1

I hope this tells you something about my setup that is causing my connection problem. The changes I made via IWCONFIG were to set the key and mode on one line, as suggested before, and to reset the channel so that the frequencies match. The funny thing is that the scan suggests using channel 6 whereas I have always set channel 5 on the AP and when I connect using Windows. Does that make any sense?

Thanks, Chris...

snecklifter · 12-15-2004, 11:28 AM

Chris,

If you obtain an IP through dhclient then it would not appear to be working .If you do not have an IP address listed when running the ifconfig command then it cannot obtain an IP lease from your AP. This is often due to a setting that wil not permit the AP to provide a lease such as no authentication, MAC address filtering, client filtering. It can obviously "see" your AP but cannot connect to it. Based on personal experience I would set the channel to either 1, 6 or 11 and then restart the AP. Then try and connect. Hope this helps.
Chris

Edit:

Also got this from ndiswrapper install wiki

If you use encryption (WEP), set the key
iwconfig wlan0 key restricted XXXXXXXX

You can use 10 hex digits for 40-bit encryption or 26 hex digits for 128-bit encryption. You may need to use open security mode instead of restricted depending on the setup of your AP. If you want to write the key in ASCII use s: (e.g. iwconfig wlan0 key restricted s

assword).

chris8109964 · 12-16-2004, 10:06 PM

Well, I'm finally connected. I switched to a third different wireless card (nice to have friends who get free goodies) being the Lucent ORiNOCO Silver. This one only supports 64-bit WEP but since WEP doesn't really stop a determined attacker anyway I figured it wouldn't matter. Besides, I am also using MAC address filtering and I have stopped broadcasting the SSID, so my security is not too horrible. To get this one working I had to switch the AP from "sharded" to "open" and from 128 to 64 bit encryption. I am not sure what the difference is between the two modes but I did confirm that it still needs the key when encryption is enabled, even when in 'open' mode. Thanks for the previous advice.

Oh and I could never get the CISCO card to connect, even when my AP was wide open, even though it works fine in Windows. Go figure.

Regards, Chris...

god_is_good478 · 01-02-2005, 08:52 PM

Hi snecklifter,

sorry to enter this thread so late...

but how does linux detect if its 64 or 128 bit encryption?

bobbozzo · 01-17-2005, 06:09 PM

I'm having the EXACT same problem...

Fedora Core 3 w/ all updates as of 1/17/05 including kernel.
(upgraded from FC2, in which I had wireless working fine with same APs)

Dell Latitude D800 notebook

Cisco Aironet 350 PCMCIA card
(airo_cs module is loaded)

Wireless works, but not with encryption.
Encryption was working in FC2.

I'm also seeing the
"unknown hardware address type 801"
from dhclient

Things I've noticed:

/proc/driver/aironet/eth1/Config
shows
WEP: shared

even though iwconfig says it is 'restricted'
and I've tried re-setting it to restricted with iwconfig

Also, the Channel isn't getting set right from ifcfg-eth1, but I can manually change it with iwconfig

Kismet sees the APs, but I can't get a connection.

I also tried hard-coding an IP, but that doesn't work either (WEP isn't working, I guess)

I haven't had it working with any of the FC3 kernels.

Thanks!

bobbozzo · 02-14-2005, 12:53 PM

Lastest FC3 kernel seems to fix this problem with my Cisco Aironet 350.

Thanks,
Barry