802.11g And Wpa?, supported at all on any ROM any version? Options

[speculatrix]

has anyone gotten an 802.11g card to work, and with WPA?

snag is at work they only want to run 11g and WPA (Apple airport extreme) on their wireless lan for security; there's only a vague chance they would drop it down to 802.11b (if the Senior Sysadmin decides to get an iPaq with wlan)... but will definitely stick with WPA.

I would get murdered if I put up my own access point (and rightly so!), so I'd have to use bluetooth, which is OK for surfing but not for file transfer.

I would be happy to choose ANY rom, and I have quite a lot of experience with linux and 802.11~ from hacking together an access point with the Keith Smith OpenSTA/OpenAP stuff on a eumitcom single board computer, so am not afraid of getting my hands dirty!

thanks for any thoughts
Paul

[speculatrix]

FORKED THIS THREAD OFF TO HERE, about building a cacko WPA supplicant:

http://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=11487

d'oh! having delved deeper, I find that cacko has got the command-line tools for wpa (wpa_supplicant, wpa_cli etc)...

see later post for details

[speculatrix]

cacko has got the command-line tools for wpa (wpa_supplicant, wpa_cli etc)...

you have to amend the /etc/pcmcia/wlan-ng.opts file and add WPA=y to the "qpewlan0" section which matches the ESSID you are trying to connect to.

then, save a backup copy of /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf, then edit it and trim out all the junk except the config part you want to use.

when you trigger wlan connection, it starts up wpa_supplicant with the appropriate arguments and in theory WPA is configured per the conf file and it should work!

I tried this at work with an Apple airport extreme and it doesn't work (someone running windows didn't make it work either, only people with Apple powerbooks can). I've tried starting wpa_supplicant manually (-w makes it wait till the interface appears) to get a log:
wpa_supplicant -d -dd -w -ieth0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -D hostap > /var/log 2>&1

and whilst impressively long, the log doesn't tell me why it fails.

sigh.

[azalin]

Are there any updates on rom support for 802.11g cards? I saw the following page after some searching:
http://prism54.org/
In which it is said that the prism54 chipsets are supported in a linux driver
( came on that page after an outdated link on http://www.fuw.edu.pl/~pliszka/hints/wireless.html )
maybe this knowledge can be merged with one of the roms Or is this chipset in no way related to the one on the CF cards? (saw they were put on USB or "cardbus", haven't found a CF card with those chips on them but I may not have looked good enough). There is a nice wiki with docs here:
http://prism54.org/phpwiki/
I also want to hold off purchasing a wlan card for my C1000 since I don't want to drop any access points to the slower a/b modes for other people which are connected.

edit: Hmm when looking a bit more I found the Linksys WCF54G card has Linux driver sources at
http://www.agere.com/mobility/wireless_lan_drivers.html
( I found this on http://www.linuxdevices.com/cgi-bin/board/...Page=0&Session= ) This adapter is CF but does not support the 802.11a 5 GHz band and only the 2.4 GHz band networks, no problem though since most access points are b/g). I hope this is useful info (haven't been able to look through those sources yet) so some of the roms may offer support for such cards

[maslovsky]

edit: Hmm when looking a bit more I found the Linksys WCF54G card has Linux driver sources at
http://www.agere.com/mobility/wireless_lan_drivers.html

There ate two versions of the driver - 7.18 release and 7.22 beta. The 7.18 is workng and will be included in Cacko 1.23. The 7.22 crashes the kernel...

Don't know which version supports your card, but if it's 7.18, then you're lucky