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jac

Member

From: /home/jac

Registered: 2009-05-19

Posts: 431

Website

Unable to set ESSID on wlan0

I'm trying to help a friend setup internet, but it is proving difficult.

He has a USB wireless adapter, a Netgear WNA3100. It was not showing up as a device because it does not have a proper driver. He copied the driver over from an installed Windows version and installed it using ndiswrapper. According to the ndiswrapper page for his model it should work.

Everything appears to work fine. He can set Tx-power, put it up or down and even scan for networks. He even had it connected to his router at one point. Since then, however, we cannot get it to work. Whenever you try to set the ESSID it does not error but it also does not set the ESSID to anything different. Trying to set the access point directly does not work either.

I've trudged through numerous forums having similar issues, and the common link seems to be ndiswrapper. Everyone who solved their problems seemed to solve it through a different order of commands, a slightly different install procedure, setting the adapter to up or down before configuring, or setting the access point directly. None of those have worked.

Trying to set the ESSID does not produce anything in dmesg.

Is there anything anyone can think of to try next? Any other logs we should look at?

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,064

Re: Unable to set ESSID on wlan0

Can you tell us about the network?  Is it open? Is it WEP? Is it WPA 1/2?

Can you see the ESSID to which you are trying to attach using sudo iwlist scan ??

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jac

Member

From: /home/jac

Registered: 2009-05-19

Posts: 431

Website

Re: Unable to set ESSID on wlan0

It is protected (ha) using WEP.

Yes, he can see the ESSID he's trying to connect to in iwlist scan, that's how he got the access point hex-string-thing to try with iwconfig wlan ap.

Edit: He just remembered something else we saw in our search, which was to make sure the router is broadcasting the ESSID. It is.

Last edited by jac (2012-06-06 18:13:35)

jac

Member

From: /home/jac

Registered: 2009-05-19

Posts: 431

Website

Re: Unable to set ESSID on wlan0

Update: We tried another USB adapter, a Netgear N600 (WNDA3100). It did not work with any of the drivers we attempted. It was the exact same issue (unable to set ESSID).

Next we tried a PCI adapter, a netgear wn311b. We should have tested its out of the box functionality, but we didn't think about it. Instead we skipped straight to installing the b43 firmware package from AUR. With it, everything has been working perfectly.

Last edited by jac (2012-06-10 16:43:14)