wpa_supplicant - how?

Mike Cohler mike.cohler at gmail.com
Thu Oct 4 16:29:50 UTC 2007


I have been playing with wpa_supplicant - and on one Dell d610 running
up-to-date F7 I can get the wpa_supplicant running (both manual and
daemon) to get a stable working link to thw AP with the ipw2200
inbuilt wireless card. This is using wpa_supplicant to connect using
WEP encryption to the local AP. At this point I believe that setting
up a WPA network section in wpa_supplicant.conf will likely get a
working connection with WPA encryption.

However I have also been trying two other systems which need to be
tested before thinking about switching encryption on the AP from WEP
to WPA, and I will give the current situation with each before asking
a few questions on this list.

a) Laptop 2 is an Amilo with no inbuilt wireless and it runs F7 fully
up to date with an Edimax USB wireless card. By compiling the rt73
driver myself this can connect nicely to the WEP encrypted AP, but the
rt73 driver is not supported in wpa_supplicant version 0.5.7 in F7.
There is nominally a driver in the current kernel (rt2x00) which has
rt73usb support, and is supported in the current version of
wpa_supppicant, but it does not work with this wireless card! I
understand that rt2x00 is under heavy development now. However the
rt73 driver does support WPA encryption natively so it should in
principle be possible to get a connection to a WPA encrypted AP with a
little extra work.

Has anyone managed to achieve this ? If so how? Are there details on a
web page somewhere?

b) Laptop 3 is a Samsung Q35 running FC6 and has an IPW3945 wireless
card in it. With the recent kernels and the iwl3945 driver it has been
possible to get this driver working and connected with a stable WEP
encrypted link to the AP.
In this machine the FC6 version of wpa_supplicant is 0.4.9-1 and seems
not to support the iwl3945 driver yet!

So I have a dilemma here - it would be nice to have all three laptops
able to make a WPA encrypted connection to the AP. However it seems
that at present I can only get one of them to potentially achieve
this! Maybe the second with a tail wind!

So the questions are:

1) It may be possible to get the EDimax USB dongle to get a WPA link
going but this is not tested - has anyone else managed to achieve this
in F7? If so how, and is there a web page describing the details?

2) I am reluctant to move the Samsung from FC6 to F7 yet since I am
not 100% confident that the ipw3945 card will be supported in a stable
way with the iwl3945 driver in F7 (anyone done this?) but also I would
like to know if there will soon be a version of wpa_supplicant in FC6
that does work with iwl3945 - has anyone managed to do this
successfully yet?

Is there a test version of wpa_supplicant for FC6 available that will
work in FC6 with the iwl3945 card using the iwl3945 driver in the
latest FC6 kernel?

Thanks

-- 

mike cohler




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