Ubuntu wpa not working

[greatfool66]

I just installed Ubuntu 8.04 the other day so I know very little about configuring things in linux.

I am connecting with wifi to a linksys wrt54g with dd-wrt firmware running a DHCP server. The connection works fine unencrypted but when I turn on wpa on my router, I can't connect anymore. I tried using dhclient but it gets "no dhcpoffers."

Also my NIC is the wmp54g with the ralink 2500rt chipset, I'm using ndiswrapper to make that work with windows drivers.

Can anyone give me simple instructions on how to make wpa work with Ubuntu 8.04? Thanks

 

[silverpig]

System/Administration/Network

That should give you the options you need?

 

[xSauronx]

i had an ralink chipset once, this was a year ago, but i ran into the following:

first, i could not use WPA2. WPA worked.

but ONLY if the key was entirely alphanumeric.

again, yes, it was a year ago. some chipsets *do* support wpa2 without a problem now, but lower the security level and simplify the key a little to see if you can get it to work. it will only take a few minutes and is worth a shot. oh, also, i didnt need ndiswrapper...can you not get the ralink drivers to work at all without it?

 

[SleepWalkerX]

Originally posted by: greatfool66
I just installed Ubuntu 8.04 the other day so I know very little about configuring things in linux.

I am connecting with wifi to a linksys wrt54g with dd-wrt firmware running a DHCP server. The connection works fine unencrypted but when I turn on wpa on my router, I can't connect anymore. I tried using dhclient but it gets "no dhcpoffers."

Also my NIC is the wmp54g with the ralink 2500rt chipset, I'm using ndiswrapper to make that work with windows drivers.

Can anyone give me simple instructions on how to make wpa work with Ubuntu 8.04? Thanks

Hmm, Ubuntu should support your ralink chipset out of the box. There should be no need for ndiswrapper. There are open-source drivers available for ralink chipsets available in Ubuntu 8.04. Are you 100% its a ralink chipset? You can type lspci -v to double-check.

To use WPA with ndiswrapper I think you have to setup wpa_supplicant. Its a lot of unnecessary work.

If your chipset is indeed a ralink chipset then try to compile your own drivers through serialmonkey's rt2x00 source. (go for the cvs release) Make sure to test it first before actually installing them.

 

[greatfool66]

Yes I'm sure its ralink (though the card is from way back around 2005 I think). Heres what I get:

Network controller: RaLink RT2500 802.11g Cardbus/mini-PCI (rev 01)
Subsystem: Linksys WMP54G 2.0 PCI Adapter
Flags: bus master, slow devsel, latency 32, IRQ 20
Memory at ea000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K]
Capabilities: <access denied>


Not sure about out of the box support. I didn't use the opensource drivers because I'm a huge noob and couldn't figure out how to compile/ install them so ndiswrapper was easier. Also I don't know how I would test a driver without installing it.

 

[SleepWalkerX]

Ok let me see if I can post up some instructions.

First thing's first. We need to grab everything we need to compile drivers. We will require the build-essential package to be able to compile anything. So open up Synaptic and install that package. Then we will need the source code for the drivers. From the link I gave you download the latest cvs of the rt2500 package. The cvs is usually experimental, but usually from serialmonkey its almost always been more stable than the beta releases. Once you download that to your Desktop, go ahead and extract it.

Now we need to bring down the drivers that are currently controlling the device. Open up the command line and type "sudo rmmod ndiswrapper" to remove ndiswrapper from running. This will bring down your wireless device. Now make sure the driver that is usually packaged with the kernel for ralink chipsets is not running (this is the driver that the kernel should have provided you, but hasn't). You can check by typing in "lsmod | grep rt". If you see something like rt2x00 or rt2500pci or something similar we need to bring it down so it won't conflict.

We have removed anything that can conflict with our driver. Now we can compile and test it out. If you are familiar with navigating through the terminal then cd your way into the folder we extracted from the first step. Inside will be a folder called Module. cd into that folder. This is where our source code is. Now the only command you have to type is "make". It'll compile our modules and dump them in the same directory. You can tell which files are our compiled kernel modules by looking at the extension and noting if it takes a .ko extension. I believe the file you will get should be called rt2500.ko. Now type "sudo insmod ./rt2500.ko".

Now our interface should be loaded so you can start testing it out. I think NetworkManager should pick up on it, but I'm not sure. I usually just play around with it through the iwconfig command. Read the man pages on iwconfig and iwpriv and learn to use those for now if NetworkManager doesn't pick up on it. That's how you can test it WPA and whatnot.

If everything works out then we need to blacklist the other kernel modules and make it to just load ours. I'll post up tonight. I'm at work atm.

 

[greatfool66]

Thanks for the instructions, thats exactly the kind of thing I needed.

Ok I did everything and I should have the new drivers installed and working. I played with ifconfig and iwconfig like you suggested and I believe I have tracked my problem down to a weak wireless signal. iwconfig shows about -80dbm signal and -80dbm noise so I get no connection. This problem probably coincided with when I added wpa and confused me. It seems like someone probably started up a wireless network on channel 1 because my noise levels have just gone up all over the house, though all the neighbors I can see are running channel 6 or 11.

 

[greatfool66]

New problems, I had to reboot and my ra0 interface was gone, though there was a new wlan0 interface that appeared when I did ifconfig. I'm thinking part of the problem might be that that the system cant read the /etc/network/interfaces file. Whenever I try to ifup or ifdown, I get couldn't read /etc/network/interfaces. The file is definitely there because I can see and edit it, there isn't much in it however.

 

[xSauronx]

Originally posted by: greatfool66
New problems, I had to reboot and my ra0 interface was gone, though there was a new wlan0 interface that appeared when I did ifconfig. I'm thinking part of the problem might be that that the system cant read the /etc/network/interfaces file. Whenever I try to ifup or ifdown, I get couldn't read /etc/network/interfaces. The file is definitely there because I can see and edit it, there isn't much in it however.

interfaces is typically sparse
are you using sudo or acting as root when you try to run ifup or ifdown?

 

[SleepWalkerX]

So you blacklisted ndiswrapper and installed the new kernel module?

Hmm, post what's in /etc/network/interfaces.

 

[greatfool66]

Ok I went into /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and added ndiswrapper to blacklist, so now ra0 should stay there when I reboot. Will get the /etc/network/interfaces file when I can print it.

 

[greatfool66]

Ok everything seems to be working right now. I'm on my linux box with remote desktop. Now if I could figure out how to get the connection to transfer files at least as fast as my cable internet...