Ambicom WL11-PCI (prism II.5) and wep

[netsparc]

A few weeks ago I bought this card at a local store under the assumption that I could install it on one of my gentoo boxes and it would be supported as well or better than the cisco 350 I have on my laptop. Hey the box says, "PCI: Windows XP/2000/ME/98/95(OSR2)/NT4.0/Linux" so why wouldn't it work fine? I've since installed it and emerged whatever prism package (wlan-ng I think) includes prism2_pci.o. At best I can connect to a network without wep. Does anyone know if there is a prism 2.5 driver that supports wep encryption? Where can I download it? I'll post settings or output if you need it.

Would there be better support in the latest 2.6 kernel? I'm running something like 2.4.22 now.

[mdwatts]

Originally posted by netsparc
Does anyone know if there is a prism 2.5 driver that supports wep encryption? Where can I download it?

Would there be better support in the latest 2.6 kernel?

G4L search results for 'prism 2.5' (http://www.google.com/linux?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=prism+2.5&btnG=Google+Search) though I didn't check to see if it supports wep encryption.

Likely the latest 2.6 kernel would have better support. Have a read/search of the 2.6 kernel changelogs at www.kernel.org

[netsparc]

3.6 Intersil PrismII based cards (the most common 802.11b cards)

http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Linux.Wireless.drivers.802.11b.html#Prism2

Has informations saying that prism 2.5 cards are fully supported with wep, but for whatever reason when I do iwconfig it says "key: off" where it should show my encryption key or *'s where the hex would be.

I do remember seeing it show the key under iwconfig before but I don't think it was in wep mode then ...

[mdwatts]

Have a look through your wireless/networking config files for a option to enable wep.

I did find the following with a quick G4L search for 'prism enable wep'.


Specifically, most of the options I seem to need to pass to enable wep/ad-hoc mode arent listed on its list, but magically show up in 'wlan.conf'.

[netsparc]

I just got this email from ambicom tech support 3 weeks prior to sending one in:


HI Andrew, We don’t support LINUX driver.Sorry for this inconvenient way. Thank you for choosing AmbiCom product.Thank you. Support

You'd think thered be support when linux is on the side of the box ... Anyway, I'm going to try installing 2.6.3 gentoo-dev-sources since they've worked well with my other computer's cisco card.

[Loki3]

I wasn't aware that you could actually use iwconfig with any of the linux-wlan-ng drivers. I quote straight from the readme file from 0.2.1-pre17, "linux-wlan-ng does not fully implement the wireless extensions interface. This means that you can't use iwconfig and its kin to set things up."

I've tried just about every option to get 128bit WEP enable for my card but had no luck. There seems to be about three different scripts, all with different options and none of them seem to work. Wireless has been one of the biggest disappointments ever.

However, I would really like to know how you got iwconfig to work with the prism chipset and I would love to finsh this WEP thing for good.

[netsparc]

I wasn't aware that you could actually use iwconfig with any of the linux-wlan-ng drivers.

I'm pretty sure that I was only using iwconfig to view the status of the card. I was never able to actually change a setting by running iwconfig because it would always give an error.

[Loki3]

Originally posted by netsparc
I'm pretty sure that I was only using iwconfig to view the status of the card. I was never able to actually change a setting by running iwconfig because it would always give an error.

Intresting. When I type iwconfig wlan0 I get "wlan0 no wireless extensions.". If it helps this is the script I use to start my network connection:

wlanctl-ng wlan0 lnxreq_ifstate ifstate=enable
wlanctl-ng wlan0 lnxreq_autojoin ssid=diagon authtype=opensystem
ifconfig wlan0 192.168.1.104
route add default gw 192.168.1.1


Reading through the man files for wlanctl-ng provides some options for WEP but I could never get them to work correctly.