Re: WPA2-WLAN on Laptop with PCMCIA card and wpa_supplicant

[Camaleón <noelamac@gmail.com>]

On Sun, 09 Jan 2011 18:03:00 +0100, eltrebol wrote:

> I apologise for the misconduct, here is the mail in plain text.

Much better, thanks! :-)

> Trying to get online wirelessly I encountered problems connecting by
> means of wpa_supplicant. I have an IBM Thinkpad R32 running Debian Lenny
> without a desktop manager. For the WLAN connection I have a PCMCIA WLAN
> card from 3com. WLAN worked with this card and this laptop both under
> Windows and under Ubuntu. The access point I am trying to connect to
> only allows WPA2-encrypted connections. With my other laptop (Lenovo
> Thinkpad R500, Ubuntu, Gnome) WLAN works fine. Here is what I did and
> what the results are:

(...)

Maybe you can compare both configuration files, the one that is working 
within Ubuntu and the one you have in Debian...

(...)

> 3.) When running ifconfig eth1 up, the light at the card is turned off.
> Everything seems to go fine, dmesg -c gives [ 1756.247035] firmware:
> requesting atmel_at76c502_3com-wpa.bin [ 1756.368570]
> ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth1: link is not ready

Hum... also take a read on the "/usr/share/doc/atmel-firmware/README.gz" 
file and ensure it is loading the right driver.

> 4.) Now I try to connect to the access point using wpa_supplicant. To
> this end I created a configuration file with the following content:
> 
> # /et/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
> ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant 
> network={
>  ssid="NETCONNECT-7124"
>  psk="<the key>"
> }

Just a note here. Have you tested with the values provided in the example 
file (/usr/share/doc/wpasupplicant/examples/wpa-psk-tkip.conf)... just in 
case?

network={
 ssid="your-ssid"
 key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
 proto=WPA
 pairwise=TKIP
 group=TKIP
 psk="your_secret_key"
}

You can als try with "proto=RSN" instead "proto=WPA".

> Running wpa_supplicant -D wext -c
> /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf -i eth1 -dd causes the light to
> turn on, flush, and turn off. Meanwhile, wpa_supplicant scans the access
> points, finds the right one (and some more), but cannot connect to any
> of them. It says 'No suitable AP found' and loops into the next try.
> Before the scanning it also states that 'Driver does not support WPA'. I
> add the exact output and the dmesg below. When I interrupt the process
> with ctrl^c the light of the card turns on and stays on, and indeed
> ifconfig shows that eth1 was brought down. iwconfig shows no changes
> compared to the starting point before running wpa_supplicant.

Yep, here are the relevant log entries:


***
Driver does not support WPA.
(...)
CTRL-EVENT-SCAN-RESULTS 
Selecting BSS from priority group 0
Try to find WPA-enabled AP
0: 00:1c:28:32:ae:49 ssid='NETCONNECT-7124' wpa_ie_len=0 rsn_ie_len=0 caps=0x11
   skip - no WPA/RSN IE
(...)
No suitable AP found.
(...)
No keys have been configured - skip key clearing
***


Hey, that "Driver does not support WPA" message does not sound very good ;-(

Greetings,

-- 
Camaleón