ndiswrapper killing me

[Rick Stevens]

Richard S. Crawford wrote:
> The elder gods, manifesting through Jeff Vian, recently decreed:
> 
> 
>>On Tue, 2005-03-29 at 09:32 -0500, Jan Morales wrote:
>>
>>>Richard S. Crawford wrote:
>>>
>>>>I'm running Fedora Core 3 on an HP zd8000. So far, so good. Except
>>>
>>>today I
>>>
>>>>attempted to get my wireless card working, and I'm having some
>>>
>>>problems.
>>>
>>>>ndiswrapper device wlan0 does not seem to be present, delaying
>>>
>>>initialization.
>>>
>>>>What could the problem be, and how can I fix it?
>>>
>>>I got a Linksys WPC54G card working with ndiswrapper, and I can tell you
>>>that you will need to recompile the kernel with CONFIG_4KSTACKS=n
>>>(default is y). It didn't work without this step. It's a bit of a job
>>>getting the source and compiling it, but other than that, I was able to
>>>get it working following the instructions.
>>>
>>>Jan
>>
>>I don't think his problem at present is related to the 4K stack. The
>>wlan0 device is not being created.
>>I had a similar problem and I had to add the following to modprobe.conf
>>to get it to create the device automatically.
>>
>>    alias wlan0 ndiswrapper
>>    options ndiswrapper if_name=wlan0
>>
>>I think I found those instructions somewhere in the ndiswrapper
>>documentation, but I don't have that on the top of my head.
>>
>>Note that I have an AirLink card with the broadcom chipset, and on my
>>laptop I did have to use the 16K stack kernel from
>>http://www.linuxant.com/driverloader/wlan/full/downloads-fc3-i686.php
>>then compile ndiswrapper against that kernel (to fix the lock-up problem
>>I had with the 4K stack kernel that comes with Fedora.)
> 
> 
> Jeff is right in this case.  This is one of the few drivers that does not
> require recompiling the kernel.
> 
> I went ahead and downloaded another driver from the ndiswrapper wiki list
> page and installed it with ndiswrapper -i.
> 
> The new driver seems to work, to a point.  wlan0 is now recognized, and
> iwlist wlan0 scan shows my wireless network is present and running, and
> identifies the SSID.  However, when I attempt to add the encryption key
> via iwconfig wlan0 enc XXXXXXXXXX, I get an error message reading "invalid
> command" (or something similar; I'm at work now, so I don't have the
> laptop in question in front of me).

I use a Broadcom BCM4306 in my laptop with ndiswrapper with the XP
driver I shanghai'd from the Windows XP installation with 4K stacks.
I use "iwconfig wlan0 key s:asciikeystrng" to specify my WEP key and it
works just fine.  You must make sure your keystring (or hex digits)
match your WEP encryption length:

	64-bit (40 user bits):		5 ASCII, 10 hex digits
	128-bit (104 user bits):	13 ASCII, 26 hex digits
	152-bit (128 user bits):	16 ASCII, 32 hex digits
	256-bit (232 user bits):	29 ASCII, 58 hex digits

A WEP key is made up of your "user bits" (or key string) and a 24-bit
"initialization vector" which is not under your control.  Here's a good
reference page:

	http://www.practicallynetworked.com/support/mixed_wep.htm
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-      Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else.       -
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