Michaels blog

I have a Thinkpad X31 with a build in ipw2100 wireless network adaptor. When i bought it (a long time ago) Linux did not support a lot of the hardware in it, so I ended up running Windows XP…

But, now I finally installed Linux and almost everything seems to be working. I did have problems with wireless and WPA-PSK authentication though. I used wpa_supplicant with the following configuration:
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ap_scan=1
eapol_version=1
network={
ssid="myssid"
group=TKIP
pairwise=TKIP
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
priority=5
proto=WPA
psk=psk generated with wpa_passphrase
}

When calling wpa_supplicant one of the arguments is the driver name. The help message says to use ipw for Intel ipw2100/2200 driver. So I did that… The output was:
ioctl[IPW_IOCTL_WPA_SUPPLICANT]: Operation not supported
ioctl[IPW_IOCTL_WPA_SUPPLICANT]: Operation not supported
Failed to set encryption.
ioctl[IPW_IOCTL_WPA_SUPPLICANT]: Operation not supported
Failed to set encryption.
ioctl[IPW_IOCTL_WPA_SUPPLICANT]: Operation not supported
etc… Google suggested that I was missing encryption modules, that the driver shipped with the kernel was buggy and other things. And then finally I found this link that sugested to use the generic wireless driver instead. I tried that, and:
# wpa_supplicant -Dwext -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -i eth2
Trying to associate with 00:16:b6:5c:00:f1 (SSID='myap' freq=0 MHz)
Associated with 00:16:b6:5c:00:f1
WPA: Key negotiation completed with 00:16:b6:5c:00:f1 [PTK=TKIP GTK=TKIP]
CTRL-EVENT-CONNECTED - Connection to 00:16:b6:5c:00:f1 completed (auth) [id=0 id_str=]
it finally works!

With the following in /etc/network/interfaces the interface comes up automatically:
iface eth2 inet dhcp
wpa-driver wext
wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
auto eth2

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 20th, 2006 at 13:09 and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.