[pkg-wpa-devel] Can't get hostap & wpasupplicant working on Thinkpad A31p with Prism 2.5 Wifi

[Brian Hutchinson]

Hi,

I've been trying to get WPA going on my Thinkpad A31p for a while.  Because
I couldn't get WPA working, recently I did the BIOS patch that would allow
me to use a non IBM wifi card.  The only other card I had was a Winston CM-9
(Atheros) and I had madwifi and wpa supplicant running great.  Problem is my
laptop saw it as another Ethernet controller and would fight and be
unstable.  Every time I would apply power it would try to PXE boot etc. so I
had to go back to trying to get the Prism 2.5 radio working.

So to recap, I was able to associate and get connectivity with madwifi & wpa
supplicant.  With the Prism card, my first problem was it had old firmware
and I finally figured out how to upgrade (couldn't find the PDA files was my
problem for the longest time) the Primary and Station firmware and I now
have what is reported below.

hostap_diag reports:
NICID: id=8013 v1.0.0 (PRISM II (2.5) Mini-PCI (SST parallel flash))
PRIID: id=0x0015 v1.1.1
STAID: id=0x001f v1.7.4 (station firmware)

For some reason dmesg shows the card showing up as wifi0 and then I see a
line where wifi0:  registered netdevice wlan0
Then I see a line where udev renamed wlan0 to eth2 and when I do a iwconfig
I see my wireless card showing up twice under the names  eth2 and
wlan0_rename.  I think I need to work on some udev rules to fix this ... I
guess it should be called wlan0.

My interfaces file looks like this:
auto eth2
iface eth2 inet dhcp
   wpa-driver hostap (have tried wext or just nothing and I get the same
result)
   wpa-bssid 00:12:a9:d1:e1:2e
   wpa-pairwise TKIP CCMP
   wpa-group TKIP CCMP
   wpa-key-mgmt WPA-PSK
   wpa-auth-alg OPEN SHARED LEAP
   wpa-sid mysid
   wpa-psk mypsk
   wpa-proto WPA RSN
   wpa-ap-scan 1 (have tried 2 as well)

kernel is 2.6.22  and I can provide .config if needed.  At first hostap,
hermes, and prism_pci were showing up in the modules list and I read where
they need to be black listed so rather I rebuilt the kernel again to not
include these and now hostap is the only one that shows up loaded in the
modules list.  lsmod | grep hostap has hits on these modules being loaded:
hostap_pci, hostap and ieee80211_crypt

On bootup, the interface tries to come up but DHCP never gets a response.  I
have firewall rules that allows the wireless traffic not to get blocked
(again this all worked with madwifi & an Atheros card so I know my rules
work).

I run iwevent in another window and the only event I see is the station mode
being set to Managed.  I don't see anything else.

I do a ps and grep for wpa and I see that wpa_supplicant is running.  I've
tried it with both the wap-driver hostap and wext.

I have a mixed system of testing & unstable.  wpa-supplicant is 0.6.0-2.
wireless tools is the latest, version 29 which I had to download and compile
myself to get rid of the warnings of iwconfig etc. being a different version
from the extensions in the kernel.

Can someone point me in the direction I should go to debug this further?
Let me know what other information you need and I'll provide it.

I've been using Debian since 1994 back with Ian was the leader and Debian
and the people behind it are the best!  Thanks in advance!

Regards,

Brian
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-wpa-devel/attachments/20070822/0a209f0a/attachment.htm