I want to make my wireless laptop able to decode the 4 wep keys on my router when it boots. Which file do I add the keys to?

Add them to /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts

There are comments in the file that explain pretty well how it works.

Isn't that file for old school cards? Unless I misunderstood, if your using a newer 32 bit cardbus, you would want to add your key to /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless.conf

I'm not sure if I'm editing either of these files correctly-my pc doesn't seem to look at these files to configure my card because I changed wireless.opts to this and saw no difference in iwconfig:

case "$ADDRESS" in


# Lucent Wavelan IEEE (+ Orinoco, RoamAbout and ELSA)
# Note : wvlan_cs driver only, and version 1.0.4+ for encryption support
*,*,*,00:60:1D:*|*,*,*,00:02:2D:*)
INFO="Orinico Classic Gold"
ESSID="any"
MODE="Managed"
# RATE="auto"
# KEY="s:secu1"
# To set all four keys, use :
# KEY="s:secu1 [1] key s:secu2 [2] key s:secu3 [3] key s:secu4 [4] key [1]"
# For the RG 1000 Residential Gateway: The ESSID is the identifier on
# the unit, and the default key is the last 5 digits of the same.
# ESSID="084d70"
# KEY="s:84d70"
;;
esac


I am using a 6 year old Compaq laptop (old school) with a brand new 128 bit wep encryption Orinoco Classic Gold 802.11b card.

iwconfig output is HERE

You have to uncomment your key line before it will be read....

Also, what I was trying to say earlier was, that wireless.opts file does nothing. It's not used when it comes to a modern PCMCIA card....

/etc/rc.d/rc.wireless.conf and /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf are the files that automatically bring up your card at boot.

I know. I didn't encrypt my wireless DSL when I tried this-tried to make it as simple as possible but named my card so that I could see the difference with iwconfig. I saw no difference and when the line was encrypted it would not connect with the key line uncommented.

Post your wireless.conf with no modifications. Your keys are useless to us unless we happen to be in the neighborhood and thats unlikely...

I took out the beginning commented line and am using a 128 bit WEP hex key:

case "$ADDRESS" in

# Here is an example of scheme matching
# Activate with "cardctl scheme essidany"


# Lucent Wavelan IEEE (+ Orinoco, RoamAbout and ELSA)
# Note : wvlan_cs driver only, and version 1.0.4+ for encryption support
*,*,*,00:60:1D:*|*,*,*,00:02:2D:*)
INFO="Orinico Classic Gold"
ESSID="any"
MODE="Managed"
# RATE="auto"
KEY="536d214a5f6e315058354b2977"
# To set all four keys, use :
# KEY="s:secu1 [1] key s:secu2 [2] key s:secu3 [3] key s:secu4 [4] key [1]"
# For the RG 1000 Residential Gateway: The ESSID is the identifier on
# the unit, and the default key is the last 5 digits of the same.
# ESSID="084d70"
# KEY="s:84d70"
;;
esac

O.k.... Man these kind of posts are rough unless you can actually sit down at the box.... INFO should be unnecessary.... ESSID I would change to your specific router broadcast ID... What do you have in rc.inet1.conf? I suppose none of that really matters but I would try it anyway... Are you using DHCP or static in your rc.inet1.conf? I don't think I'm going to be able to help you much. Just make sure your key is correct. It is 26 digits... So you can connect when WEP is disabled but not with it enabled huh? Maybe you could even put your router IP and ESSID in /etc/resolv.conf to see if you can't give it a nudge... I think the format is:

nameserver 192.168.2.1
search Iceberg

Thats my router IP and Local Domain Name/Network Name (Iceberg). I didn't specify 'Iceberg' anywhere except for on my routers web config page.... I'd double check your routers web config page just to make sure everything is on the up and up there... Maybe you did something without realizing it, like enabled MAC address filtering or something without entering your Cards MAC address... Just grasping here... Sorry...

O.k... Wait a minute... What did you do to your rc.wireless.conf? It's all screwed up....

This is how it should look.

Seems your missing a *) and your rc.inet1 and/or rc.pcmcia should call upon HWADDR not ADDRESS....

That is the entire file right there... They have so much commented crap in there it was hard to make heads or tails out of it, so I cleaned it up. Those are really the only 3 things you need...

ah-thanx!

This works real well to decode 1 wep key at boot. I see from the comments that I can decode 4 hex keys at boot. I tried to use 2, but it wouldn't decode a signal. What's wrong with this rc.wireless.conf file:

VERBOSE=1

case "$HWADDR" in

*)
ESSID="LinuxNeighborhood"
MODE="Managed"
KEY="30633d362955544b6d76273356 [1] 6d214a53262e7b5d4d484c5e53 [2]"
;;
esac