[TriLUG] having trouble getting wpa setup

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

I'm going to a conference this week where I'll need wpa to 
get wifi access (I only found this out yesterday). I only 
have wep here at home. wpa_supplicant seems to be able to 
handle wep (acording to the docs), so I've spent the last 
day trying to get wpa_supplicant to connect to a wep wap.

here's my wpa_supplicant.conf


ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant

network={
         ssid="MYSSID"
         key_mgmt=NONE
         wep_key0="abcde"
         wep_key1=HEXKEY................
         wep_tx_keyidx=1
}

I can give lots of debugging output if needed from 
wpa_supplicant either driven by commands from wpa_cli or 
from using the above conf file with wpa_supplicant in 
debugging mode, but really have no idea what I'm doing.

Sometimes the HEXKEY doesn't appear in the output of 
iwconfig, and I get a dhcp IP from another network 
(presumably a neighbor). Other times the HEXKEY is in the 
output of iwconfig, but I don't get an IP; in this case I 
dhcpcd from the command line, but I don't see any calls 
arriving at my dhcpd server and the dhcpcd call times out.

Any suggestions as to how to step through this?

I have b cards. I don't know whether they're wpa-able. The 
list of drivers in wpa_supplicant would seem to cover what I 
have (PrismII) (I have an orinoco gold for which I can't 
tell if I have a wpa_supplicant driver or not). I can 
connect just fine to my local wap using my old wep scripts 
(wireless utils or whatever)

I'm using kernel 2.6.21.5
wpa_supplicant 0.5.8
wireless tools 28

Thanks Joe
-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!