FC3: WEP doesn't work with Cisco Aironet 350

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Thu, 20 Jan 2005, Michael W. Carney wrote:

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> Hi Barry,
>
> Barry Gould wrote:
> | Hi,
> | On my Dell Latitude D800, I had my PCMCIA Cisco Aironet 350 working fine
> | in FC2, with 128bit WEP.
>
> Likewise, I had it working fine on my ibm thinkpad R40, with the minipci
> aironet 350, for both FC1 and FC2. The wireless environment details were
> 128bit WEP, shared key, don't broadcast ESSID.
>
> Alas, after installing FC3, the airo driver no longer works in my
> environment (at all - even w/ WEP, broadcast SESID). No errors; it just
> won't associate with the access point. It does find other access points
> in the neighborhood, but since they're WEPed, I can't get it to
> associate with them either.

This is quite strange.  I have the airo 350 minipci in a T40.  I did a 
fresh install of FC3, and the card was detected (now eth0, where in FC2 it 
was eth1) and configured.  The airo driver in 2.6.10 claims to support the 
MPI card directly.  I had to delete the interface in system-config-network 
(wich came up as Ethernet instead of Wireless) and recreate it, but it's 
worked just fine ever since. (128-bit WEP, hidden SSID, Firmware 5.41.)

Ah, I see below that you are using a much later firmware version than I 
am.  You might try rolling it back in Windows (you'll need the matching 
driver in Windows or it will keep updating the firmware).  (I don't know 
if this has much to do with the PCMCIA version of the card.  It would 
surprise me not at all if it did not.)

I think it worked with the latest 2.6.10 kernel, but APM suspend-to-RAM 
doesn't so I am stuck using 2.6.9-681 for now.

>
> |
> | However, after upgrading to FC3, WEP no longer works.
> | (I can however connect to non-encrypted networks)
>
> Hmm. That's more than I can do at the moment.
>
> |
> | The only errors I see are
> | DHClient says:
> | "unknown hardware address type 801"
> |
> | However, I also notice
> | /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
> |
> | modprobe.conf contains:
> | alias eth1 airo_cs
> |
> | and both airo_cs and airo modules are loaded.
> |
> | I'm running the current kernel, but it hasn't worked with any of the FC3
> | kernels.
> |
> | Googling reveals others are having the same problem. One such discussion
> | is here:
> | <http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&postid=1414559>
> |
> | One thread mentioned disabling IPV6 in modprobe.conf... I tried that,
> | and even tried compiling a kernel w/o IP6, but that still didn't make a
> | difference.
> |
> | My company has standardized on Cisco equipment, so it is difficult to
> | use something else.
> |
> | Thanks,
> | Barry Gould
>
> Cisco released a new version of their driver/userland utilities this
> past May (2004), which purports to work on their firmware thru and
> including version 5.30.17. Check out cisco's web site for details. It
> claims to work on some 2.4 kernels; I didn't bother trying it myself
> under 2.6. Maybe it'll work for you.
>
> My laptop dualboots FC3 and Windows XP; I downloaded the latest windows
> bits which updated the firmware to 5.60.8. Worked just great. This
> version of the firmware of course breaks the FC3 airo driver (you can't
> set your ESSID anymore). One can still locate/display APs in the
> neighborhood, FWIW.
>
> I figured I'd try and fix the driver myself. I tried diff'ing Cisco's
> version of the airo driver (airo.c) with the version that's included
> with the 741 kernel. There are quite a few differences. Unfortunately,
> both versions claim to be the same (swversion = 2.1), and ownership of
> this driver in linux seems up in the air at the moment. Checking
> sourceforge shows that the latest version was released april of 2001,
> which is much different than either the FC3 or the Cisco version.
>
> Without clarification as to the owner and details from cisco regarding
> the interfaces to the 5.60.8 firmware code, I can't see the situation
> getting better.
>
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-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs