The short story is this: my USB wireless device running under ndiswrapper seems proper in everyway other than the fact that NO packets are ever seen flying through the air while using ethereal to monitor it.

Here are the details:
1) Engenious NUB-362 USB AR5523 based wireless device
2) Ubuntu-Dapper with ndiswrapper v1.18
3) wireless device works fine under dual-boot Windows
4) wireless device works fine under ndiswrapper on
another machine running Ubuntu-Dapper
5) Both RX & TX packet counts increment when trying to
connect to the DHCP server.
6) The DHCP server never reports seeing any incoming
wireless packets.
7) Ethereal on a nearby laptop never reports seeing any
packets issuing a DHCPREQUEST.

I'm at a loss to explain how everything can be working, yet its not working.

Any ideas.

Here's the nitty-gritty:


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root@epia:~# more /etc/network/interfaces
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
hwaddress ether FA:CE:BE:EF:ED:ED


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root@epia:~# iwlist wlan0 scan
wlan0 Scan completed :
Cell 01 - Address: 00:0F:B3:11D:93
ESSID:"ACTIONTEC"
Protocol:IEEE 802.11g
Mode:Managed
Frequency:2.412 GHz (Channel 1)
Quality:0/100 Signal level:-60 dBm Noise level:-256 dBm
Encryption keyff
Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 22 Mb/s
6 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s; 24 Mb/s
36 Mb/s; 48 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s
Extra:bcn_int=200
Extra:atim=0

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root@epia:~# iwconfig wlan0 essid any

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root@epia:~# iwconfig wlan0
wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"ACTIONTEC"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: 00:0F:B3:11D:93
Bit Rate:54 Mb/s
Encryption keyff
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

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root@epia:~# ifconfig wlan0
wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr FA:CE:BE:EF:ED:ED
inet6 addr: fe80::f8ce:beff:feef:eded/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:8 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:14 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:855 (855.0 b) TX bytes:3204 (3.1 KiB)


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root@epia:~# dhclient wlan0
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client V3.0.3
Copyright 2004-2005 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit]

Listening on LPF/wlan0/fa:ce:be:ef:ed:ed
Sending on LPF/wlan0/fa:ce:be:ef:ed:ed
Sending on Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 6
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 14
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 14
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 15
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 12
No DHCPOFFERS received.
No working leases in persistent database - sleeping.

There are a couple of things to check. First, what is the output of ndiswrapper -l? You should see the driver installed and the hardware present. If you don't then the Windows driver is likely the problem. Second, have a look through your logs (/var/log/syslog, /var/log/messages and dmesg) and see if ndiswrapper is complaining about anything.

I rebuilt the kernel ....
I rebuilt ndsiwrapper ....
And then on a whim ....
I rebuilt wireless-tools ....
wa-la .... I have real pkts flying now.

Just in case anybody happens to run across my original posting