Using HostAP to solve a WLAN problem, but help needed

[Teemu Nikkilä]

Hi,

I'm new to this list and new to HostAP. I installed HostAP because I
have had a strange problem with WLAN in my laptop and I thought this
would be a good tool to debug it and further ask other users for ideas
in this mailing list (BTW it's funny you seldom subscibe to a mailing
list just to say: "It works great out of the box, thanks! Bye" :-)

I have two laptops, a Sony Vaio PCG-C1VE and an IBM TP600, one D-Link
DWL-650 PCMCIA WLAN card and a Buffalo Air Station WBR-B11 AP connected
to my home LAN. I'm using SuSE 8.2 as my distro and mainly their tools
and RPM's to configure the systems. In the TP600 everything works just
fine, the drivers for WLAN seem to be (according to lsmod) orinoco_cs,
orinoco and hermes (the SuSE default setup). I copied the settings over
to the Sony to be sure they were the same, but the link never came up. I
then tried all sorts of tricks but nothing helped, the green led on the
DWL650 just kept blinking. I had SuSE 7.3 in this machine before the 8.2
and the same WLAN card worked just fine then. I can use a wired PCMCIA
NIC in this machine.

The solution may be of RTFM in nature, so please tell me which fine
manuals to read for starters. For example I couldn't figure out the
configuration file where you define things like ESSID (tried
/etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts).

To give you an idea of my WLAN setup, here is the output of iwconfig in
the TP600, when the link works:

lo        no wireless extensions.

sit0      no wireless extensions.

eth0      IEEE 802.11-DS  ESSID:"lambda"  Nickname:"roope"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.462GHz  Access Point:
00:07:40:87:2E:D9
          Bit Rate:11Mb/s   Tx-Power=15 dBm   Sensitivity:1/3
          Retry min limit:8   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:56/92  Signal level:-58 dBm  Noise level:-148 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

and here from ifconfig:

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:05:5D:5B:E0:6C
          inet addr:10.0.0.100  Bcast:10.0.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::205:5dff:fe5b:e06c/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:1666 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:1485 errors:4 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0
          RX bytes:671121 (655.3 Kb)  TX bytes:262865 (256.7 Kb)

If I try to set up the link in the Sony I get:

(plugged in the card)

linux:~ # iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

sit0      no wireless extensions.

wlan0     IEEE 802.11b  ESSID:"test"
          Mode:Master  Frequency:2.422GHz  Access Point:
00:05:5D:5B:E0:6C
          Bit Rate:11Mb/s   Sensitivity=1/3
          Retry min limit:8   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:0  Signal level:0  Noise level:0
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

linux:~ # iwconfig wlan0 essid "lambda"
linux:~ # iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

sit0      no wireless extensions.

wlan0     IEEE 802.11b  ESSID:"lambda"
          Mode:Master  Frequency:2.422GHz  Access Point:
00:05:5D:5B:E0:6C
          Bit Rate:11Mb/s   Sensitivity=1/3
          Retry min limit:8   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:0  Signal level:0  Noise level:0
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

linux:~ # iwconfig wlan0 mode Ad-Hoc

(the link-LED stops blinking)

linux:~ # iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

sit0      no wireless extensions.

wlan0     IEEE 802.11b  ESSID:"lambda"
          Mode:Ad-Hoc  Frequency:2.422GHz  Cell: 02:05:86:28:E0:6C
          Bit Rate:2Mb/s   Sensitivity=1/3
          Retry min limit:8   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:0/92  Signal level:-69 dBm  Noise level:-90 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

I also tried 'iwconfig wlan0 mode Managed' - no success. This will only
turn 'Access Point' to 44:44:44:44:44:44.

I'm a bit lost here...

-Teemu