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

[Kel Modderman]

On Wed, 22 Aug 2007 08:57:25 pm Brian Hutchinson wrote:
> 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.

Never used prism hardware. All i know is its old, reliable, 802.11b and a 
royal pain in the ass when it comes to WPA ;-)

Having never been cursed to use th hardware, I cannot comment on formware 
versions, best drivers etc etc, because I don't know. Best place to ask that 
advice is hostap project mailing list.

>
> 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.


Hint: look in /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules

>
> 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 no idea about prism stuff. If noone else answers here then I'd suggest 
asking on the hostap mailing list (hostap at shmoo.com).

Thanks, Kel.