Getting WPA to work

Fri Mar 4 21:37:08 PST 2005

Hello,
I am having trouble getting the wireless to run on my laptop. I
recently installed Mandrake 10.1 Official on an HP pavilion ze4805us
laptop. This laptop has a Broadcom BCM94306MP integrated wireless
card.

Output from "lspci":

00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc AGP Bridge [IGP 320M] (rev 13)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc PCI Bridge [IGP 320M] (rev 01)
00:02.0 USB Controller: ALi Corporation USB 1.1 Controller (rev 03)
00:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: ALi Corporation M5451 PCI AC-Link
Controller Audio Device (rev 02)
00:07.0 ISA bridge: ALi Corporation M1533 PCI to ISA Bridge [Aladdin IV]
00:08.0 Modem: ALi Corporation M5457 AC'97 Modem Controller
00:09.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN
Controller (rev 02)
00:0a.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1410 PC card Cardbus Controller
(rev 02)
00:10.0 IDE interface: ALi Corporation M5229 IDE (rev c4)
00:11.0 Bridge: ALi Corporation M7101 Power Management Controller [PMU]
00:12.0 Ethernet controller: National Semiconductor Corporation DP83815
(MacPhyter) Ethernet Controller
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility U1

Output from "lspci -n":

00:00.0 Class 0600: 1002:cab0 (rev 13)
00:01.0 Class 0604: 1002:700f (rev 01)
00:02.0 Class 0c03: 10b9:5237 (rev 03)
00:06.0 Class 0401: 10b9:5451 (rev 02)
00:07.0 Class 0601: 10b9:1533
00:08.0 Class 0703: 10b9:5457
00:09.0 Class 0280: 14e4:4320 (rev 02)
00:0a.0 Class 0607: 104c:ac50 (rev 02)
00:10.0 Class 0101: 10b9:5229 (rev c4)
00:11.0 Class 0680: 10b9:7101
00:12.0 Class 0200: 100b:0020
01:05.0 Class 0300: 1002:4336

To sum up, the wireless device has pci id 14e4:4320 and is (rev 2). I
went to the driver download page on the ndiswrapper site and
downloaded what I believed to be the right driver, which is the one
for the dell truemobile 1300. The url for the download is
http://ftp.us.ell.com/network/R90501.EXE so that anyone can quickly
confirm that this is the right driver if they are so inclined to look.
I extracted the file and ran the following commands, which are
straight from the installation directions for ndiswrapper:

ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
modprobe ndiswrapper

No errors were reported.

Output from "ndiswrapper -l" which I believe shows corrent installation:

Installed ndis drivers:
bcmwl5  hardware present

Relevant output from "dmesg" also showing what I believe to be showing correct
installation of the card:

ndiswrapper version 0.8 loaded
ndiswrapper adding bcmwl5.sys
PCI: Found IRQ 9 for device 0000:00:09.0
wlan0: ndiswrapper ethernet device 00:90:4b:61:d0:bb using driver bcmwl5.sys

So far so good. Here is the output from "iwconfig" again showing that the card
seems to be installed correctly:

lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

sit0      no wireless extensions.

wlan0     IEEE 802.11g  ESSID:""
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.412GHz  Access Point: FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF
          Bit Rate:54Mb/s   Tx-Power:25 dBm
          RTS thr:2347 B   Fragment thr:2346 B
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:0/100  Signal level:-10 dBm  Noise level:-256 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

I downloaded, compiled and installed wpa_supplicant, and copied
wpa_cli, wpa_passphrase, and wpa_supplicant to /usr/local/bin.

Here is my .config file used when compiling:

CONFIG_DRIVER_NDISWRAPPER=y
CONFIG_CTRL_IFACE=y

And here is my wpa_supplicant.conf file which is placed in /etc:

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant # for wpa_cli support

network={
  ssid="my_ssid"
  psk="my_psk"
  key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
  proto=WPA
}

At this point, I run the commands:

ifconfig wlan0 up
wpa_supplicant -Dndiswrapper -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -dd

Only the second command produces any output. The actual ssid has been replaced
with "myssid". The output is:

Initializing interface 'wlan0' conf '/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf' driver
'ndiswrapper'
Configuration file '/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf' -> '/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf'
Reading configuration file '/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf'
ctrl_interface='/var/run/wpa_supplicant'
Line: 3 - start of a new network block
ssid - hexdump_ascii(len=5):
     54 69 74 61 6e                                    myssid
PSK (ASCII passphrase) - hexdump_ascii(len=9): [REMOVED]
key_mgmt: 0x2
proto: 0x1
PSK (from passphrase) - hexdump(len=32): [REMOVED]
Priority group 0
   id=0 ssid='Titan'
Initializing interface (2) 'wlan0'
Own MAC address: 00:90:4b:61:d0:bb
Failed to enable WPA in the driver.
Failed to disable WPA in the driver.
rmdir[ctrl_interface]: No such file or directory

The last few lines seem to show the problem: WPA was not able to be enabled
(or disabled) in the driver. Has anyone else had this problem with this card? Is
it the correct driver? I will try other drivers as that may be the
problem, but any suggestions would be greatly appreciated if anyone
has any insight.

In case you are wondering, here is the output from "ifconfig wlan0" after
executing an "ifconfig wlan0 up" showing that the card does seem to be
initialized and recognized by linux:

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:90:4B:61:D0:BB
          inet6 addr: fe80::290:4bff:fe61:d0bb/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:4 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:328 (328.0 b)
          Interrupt:9 Memory:d0000000-d0001fff

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