The Joys of Wireless Networking and Linux

Now that I have access to my router, I wanted to set it up as a wireless AP for my laptop. Note that I am not connected to the internet with this at the moment it is merely an isolated LAN. I have an HP zv6000 (512MB RAM, AMD Athlon 3200+) with a Linksys WPC54GS wireless adapter.

In the past, I have installed the bcm43xx (Broadcom) firmware for the adapter and executed

sudo /etc/init.d/NetworkManager start

to locate and connect to wireless networks. This time I am having issues, and not just with my router.

At first I had my router (Buffalo WHR-G125) set as a wireless AP with no authentication method. I executed the above command and could not connect to the network. Look here for the results of dmesg right after I attempted to connect: http://nonlogic.org/dump/text/1186352893.html. The main concern to me was the wlan0: No IPV6 routers found line.

At this point, I noted that I could "see" the SSID with iwlist, and could set the ESSID to the router's broadcasting SSID with iwconfig. This still did not allow me to connect to the network. Also note that a wired IPV4 connection works fine across the network.

A friend suggested I use the tried and true command line applications for making a wireless connection. First I tried:

ifconfig wlan0 down
iwconfig wlan0 essid dd-wrt
iwconfig wlan0 mode managed
ifconfig wlan0 up
dhclient wlan0

This resulted in me recieving an IPV6 address from the router (fe80::218:f8ff:fe45:52b/64), but I still could not ping it, and there was no connection.

At this point, my friend suggested I enable WPA2 authentication with TKIP encryption, which I did. I then attempted to execute the following:


ifconfig wlan0 up
iwpriv wlan0 set AuthMode=WPA2PSK
iwpriv wlan0 set EncrypType=TKIP
iwpriv wlan0 set WPAPSK=""
iwconfig wlan0 essid dd-wrt
iwconfig mode managed
iwconfig wlan0 mode managed
dhclient wlan0


where my WPA2 key is left out for obvious reasons. I ran into issues with the iwpriv lines:

invalid command set

I then decided it might be a good idea to attempt to disable IPV6, but I still have not found a easy way to do this, I will continue to look into it. It was also suggested that I install wpa_supplicant and I will look into that shortly. At this point in time, this issue is unresolved, I will update here as soon as I get it to work (along with a detailed howto on how to get bcm43xx working and configuring the adapter on a wireless network).