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ka1zex

WEP Shared Key wireless encryption and general etc's

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Hi, I just installed SUSE 9.1 personal on my twinhead A5020 laptop. First of all I discovered that my Dlink DWL-G650 AirPlusXtremeG card works just fine with no more than basic input from me, which is very nice. The only thing I can't seem to figure out is how to do the enryption. I use a Linksys WRT54GS wireless router with no SSID and pre-shared WEP key encryption. I think I need someone to hold my hand to get that setup in the laptop.

 

Let me say I am extremly disapointed that my linksys wpc54gs card does not work like the dlink card does. I tried to download a precompiled ndiswrapper thing that I read about here, but it did not install, not sure why. So I can't get that working yet, and apparently suse doesnt have the compiler thing built in to go about it that way. (I am REALLY a novice at this as if you can't tell) Don't know if someone can point me in the right direction there. I don't know that I'll be buying anymore linksys products in the near future. (not to mention the windows XP driver seems to be poorly written and always installs with a runtime error, and forget trying to uninstall reinstall, we wont go there)

 

I also just bought an old 802.11B card on ebay made by orinco? with some other name on it and it comes with a magmount antenna. Thought that might be cool since I can usually pick up plenty of default linksys networks around here with just the regular card. Enterasys is what it actually says on the card. Anyone have any experience with these? I am really hoping it is not a PoS. Seemed like a good deal at... $40? with shipping incl i think. Was wondering what kind of software for linux was around to find networks and possibly automatically connect to them as i drive around? I really don't know anything about it, but that would be cool if it can be done.

 

Any help with any of the above is greatly appreciated. Would also like to know if there is another linux install I should play with by popular oppinion or whatever? I have plenty of spare drives and computers to fool around with. I would also like to make a gateway/server at some point with an old gateway dual xeon 450 server I have if anyone has any advice on that.

 

That's probably way too much all at once, but thanks in advance for any help.

 

 

Ron KA1ZEX

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There is a utility called Kwifi in Suse that should help. If it is not installed, it is on the cd, I think. This should allow you to set the WEP values and default SSID. It has a graphical interface, which makes life a little easier.

 

 

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Can you share with us the exact model of the Orinoco? It likely works with Linux as most of the old Gold and Silver cards do.

 

As far as WEP goes, everything works withoutn WEP, and then when you turn it on from your router and enter the WEP key in SuSE it stops working? Do you have a dash between every four digits of the WEP key? xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xx etc? Are you re-initiating the card after enableing the WEP key? That is, pulling it out, waiting a few seconds and sliding it back in?

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I'm checking for Kwifi now, see if I can find that. I'm not sure the exact model Orinco because it has yet to get here, but supposedly it has linux drivers included so it should work. Was wondering if anyone had one and was using it to drive around with?

 

With the WEP I have not tried it yet, because I could not find where to set it up. So I just turned it off in my router and put the card in the laptop and everything works fine. (wish the linksys one did) Now I want to get the WEP setup to get rid of my freloading neighbors wink (only because I don't like them lol)

 

Ok was not able to find Kwifi in search, including cd, will try something else to find it.

 

Ron

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In Yast, try searching for kwifimanager. Mine is on the DVD.

 

If not, let us know and I will find a link.

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I was not able to find it, even on the CD. The CD is one i downloaded off of linxiso? Anyway, between that and not being able to get that ndiswrapper program I got a little fed up. Right now I am installing mandrake 10.0 on it to see if I like that any better. I really didnt have anything important on the SuSe one yet and therefore no reason not to try it. If I can just get my linksys card to work under Mandrake I think I will be pretty happy. Will let you know if I have better luck setting up the encryption once I get it up and running and one card or the other functioning again!

 

Thanks,

 

Ron

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It's my understanding that, while you can use WEP keys with wireless Linux drivers, the router must be set to OPEN, not pre-shared. I saw this, I seem to remember, in the sourceforge.net/madwifi projects forum. I had the same problems as you were having and once I changed my router to OPEN I was able to connect with my WEP key just fine.

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That is one solution that I saw. Depends on how the router is set up. I just installed Madwifi on my Mandrake system using managed mode and WEP. If the wep is written in asci or hex makes a difference how you insert the wep code. I got into my router's config program and found that mine was hex, so just inputing the numbers (in my case) worked fine in managed mode.

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