WPA-PSK on Thinkpad T40

[Brian Bender]

On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 7:35 PM, Stephen Bosch posting-at-vodacomm.ca
|hostaplist/Allow to me| <ap7zwsp4mt at sneakemail.com> wrote:

> The problem is that my psk is 26 characters, and this works with other
> operating systems, so I don't understand why wpa_supplicant should be
> rejecting it.

Your network's passphrase is a string that just happens to look like a
hex number. It's still just a string to the algorithm that uses it --
are you sure you entered it correctly? It's a _case-sensitive_ string,
for one thing...

The psk for WPA-PSK is either (A) calculated from the network's SSID
and a passphrase (string) of 8 to 63 characters, or (B) entered
directly as a 64-character hex value. That's part of the WPA spec. The
other operating systems' user interfaces may not require quotes around
it, but they're still using that 26-char string as a passphrase,
because at that length that's all it can be.

You can see what the actual psk is by passing your SSID and passphrase
to the wpa_passphrase utility that's part of the hostap package. The
output is even in the right format for your wpa_supplicant.conf

 - Brian