[TriLUG] Connecting to the UNC Wireless network

[Dmitry Rashkeev]

Hello,

I am a student at UNC-Chapel Hill, and a fairly avid linux user. At this 
point, I have an IBM R40, the standard laptop sold by the university at 
a discount to students. Needless to say, my first boot involved the 
Mandrake installation disk. The computer adjusted extremely well to the 
new OS. At this point, I dual boot between Windows and Linux, and things 
could not get any happier. The only problem I have had so far was 
getting the wireless driver to work. The card in the computer is a Cisco 
Aironet 350, with a MiniPCI interface. Needless to say, it was exotic 
enough not to be detected by Mandrake's harddrake thingy, and so I had 
to move on to the manual configuration. I installed both the Cisco 
drivers and the ario_mpi drivers that have been floating around, and 
with little luck.

The UNC wireless network is encrypted with a 40-bit key, and requires a 
registered MAC address to connect. I tried both the stock Cisco drivers 
and the opensource airo_mpi, but could not get them to work. In both 
cases, the drivers loaded successfully into the kernel, and lit up my 
radio light indicator on the panel of my laptop. After that, the 
troubles began. The airo_mpi drivers loaded successfully, and I was able 
to talk to them using the iwconfig interface. I could even scan the 
ether for access points, and found quite a few of them. However, I 
simply could not get the darn thing to associate. I got it to work 
twice, both in disconnected incidents, but for my life could not figure 
out what I did. iwconfig eth1 essid "****"; iwconfig eth1 key 
****-****-** restricted; iwconfig eth1 key on turned off my radio. I had 
to go iwconfig eth1 key [1] ****-****-** restricted; iwconfig eth1 key 
[1] on which seemed to work, and the radio was reactivated. At that 
point, the key was configured, so iwconfig eth1 ap any should have 
produced some sort of binding. It did not. My subsequent attempts have 
been basically typing iwconfig commands at random, until the card 
associated. I could find no correlation between the commands and what I 
did, and I could not go through the .bash_history since the computer 
crashed every time I got the card working (a rare thing for linux, so 
I'm thinking it's not coincidence). The second time it worked after a 
pretty much random combination (in different order) of the commands 
above. This seemed very un-linuxlike.

With Cisco, the iwconfig interface did not work, so I used the ACU 
utility. Here I found a very interesting "feature," where the default 
password was set when the program was started, and said password was not 
in any documentation. After a while, I found (on the internet) that the 
password was "Cisco." After figuring that bit out, the interface 
associated without problem to the access point, but dhcp simply did not 
work. Strangely, the ifconfig and the cisco status utility both said 
that there was network traffic caused by dhclient. The only problem 
seemed to be that dhcp was for whatever reason not detecting the server. 
At this point, I could not take the pain anymore, so I stopped. Has 
anyone had any luck with this card/computer combination, or mybe even 
the good fortune of having connected to the UNC network under Linux? I 
appreciate any help I can get.

Thanks,

Dmitry Rashkeev