[TriLUG] Connecting to the UNC Wireless network

[kevin]

On Tue, 2004-02-10 at 12:18, Dmitry Rashkeev wrote:

I recently was handed an Aironet 350, wouldn't work for the past owner,
didn't for me at first.  Flash the firmware, and poof, all better!

Good luck, of course, getting "registered" is a different problem,
frequently referred to as the 8th layer of the OSI stack, politics.  ;')



Kevin

> 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
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