WEP 128b was working, now not

[noid]

Ok, my SL-6k was connecting fine to my Linksys using WEP 128b.  Went War-Walking with Kismet and found some open access points (that was fun), came home and tried to reconnect to my Linksys and no such luck.  Rebooted, etc. nada.  I tried turning off all security on the Linksys and no luck, still won't connect.  My other systems in the house work just fine w/ or w/o WEP.

Could it be possible I fried my wireless card in the unit, or did some configuration file perhaps get clobbered maybe when I powered down the unit with KISMET running?

I looked at the dmesg file (tail -f /home/system/var/log/dmesg) but no messages appear when I try to connect to my linksys.  

If I try ad-hoc config again, run KISMET I see my access point just fine, right channel etc.  Its as if I can no longer transmit wireless packets from the PDA.

Using tcpdump on my laptop (wireless) I never see any packets coming from the pda.

Can anyone list the set of files I should check on my system, or where I can begin to debug this now semi brick of a pda?  Or is there an easy way to revert my network files back to factory settings?  

Up to now, the pda has been working great wireless and all !

Thanks in advance

[jamesm]

First port of call (pardon the pun) is iwconfig:

Code: [Select]

iwconfig wlan0
The fact that Kismet is still working suggests to me that your Z is fine, perhaps a .conf file has been fried somewhere along the line.

Let us see what iwconfig thinks before going any further.

[noid]

Unfortunately last night I lost my patience with the pda and took the brute force approach resetting the pda back to factory defaults and eventually got networking working again.

After formating, created a wireless config using networking wizard; pda still couldn't connect.  Turned off all WEP on the linksys (again), deleted and re-created pda config, power-cycled it a few times, still no connect.  I was loosing my mind at this point.  

Was about to give up when I tried forcing different channels on the linksys and switching from infrastructure mode to ad-hoc on the pda and back a few times.  All of a sudden the pda connected.  That connect icon at least stopped blinking the world icon and gave me the blue/green card icon which turned red eventually with a dialog box indicating I had to recheck my settings.  They were fine and I'm just blaming my linksys box at this point.

Why this started working makes no sense to me other than the pda got stuck on a channel for transmit that was not the same as my linksys.   Or I had some weird interference from another AP in the neighborhood.  Another node near me had a similar SSID name as me but all in lower case, mine capitalized the first letter (Sonoma vs. sonoma).  So I changed my SSID to something different.  Maybe my PDA was listening to my linksys, but trying to connect to my neighbors?  Split tx/rx channels?

I also had to first ping from the pda to the linksys before I could finally use the net.  Seems the pda was not performing an ARP when connecting or my linksys box is just flakey.  I'm just glad its back working again.

WEP 128b mode is working again and the pda is working as it was before my war-walk or should I call it the pda-death-walk.   Totally weird.   Now to reload all the goodies.

[cvmiller]

Unfortunately last night I lost my patience with the pda and took the brute force approach resetting the pda back to factory defaults and eventually got networking working again.

WEP 128b mode is working again and the pda is working as it was before my war-walk or should I call it the pda-death-walk.   Totally weird.   Now to reload all the goodies.

Wow, that was a long walk for a short drink of water.

For what it is worth, I run kismet all the time on my SL-6000, and then switch back to my home wlan with no problems.

The only difference I see is that I am running 64bit wep instead of 128. I am using a linksys wrt54g at home.

So hopefully you won't get stuck again. using iwconfig _should_ give you quite a bit of info on how things are working (or not). tcpdump is useless if the wlan part isn't working (since it is at a lower OSI layer).

Good luck on your war-walking!

Craig...