HostAP and WPA2 with Intersil Prism card

[Dave Neuer]

On 12/12/06, Alex Pounds <alex at alexpounds.com> wrote:
>
> My question is simple: Can I use hostAP to do the WPA2 part in software, and
> thus use my laptop with my home network? If so, how? I've been told
> conflicting things about wpa_supplicant (story 1: It needs hardware support.
> Story 2: Hardware support is not neccessary, it needs driver support) and on
> the whole I am hugely confused. If someone can let me know if this is
> possible and point me to some simple documentation on how to set it up, I'd
> be most grateful.

I'm new here too, and probably reall don't know what I'm talking
about. That caveat aside:

I just spent the last couple of days slaving over my Belkin Prism 2.5
card and Debian desktop, trying to get it to work with my WPA-enabled
router also. I managed to finally get it to "sort of" work by updating
the firmware on the card using prism2_srec (which comes with
hostap-utils) and then running the normal debian "interfaces" way w/
wpa_supplicant and the hostap kernel driver. So it seems like it is
possible to get it working without running hostapd.

However, notice the "sort of" working part. In my case, I can
associate w/ my AP, but then wpa_supplicant continuously get
disconnected and reconnected, to the point where I can't run DHCP on
the interface. I was going to try to troubleshoot it today. So, I
don't know if my problem is caused by poor signal, interference w/
other wireless devices I'm running, inadequate firmware (I upgraded
from the 1.4.2 station firmware which came on the card to 1.7.4 -- the
minimum version required to get WPA working, in my understanding) or
some kind of configuration issue.

Hopefully someone w/ more experience can correct me where I've erred
here. At any rate, I thought it might be useful -- it took me a
looooong time to get to there w/ the information I could find online.

Good luck,
Dave