Hello,

Yesterday I put my Linksys card in my machine and
was given an IP address from somebody else's (wireless)
dhcp server. Time for some protection!

I thought the answer was WEP encryption, but a number
of people have said that WEP can be cracked. I think it
probably is good enough to prevent casual users such
as myself from being able to talk to my router. But
Ted Guild pointed out that if I use WEP, I visitors
will have to change their configs whenever they come
to my house. Instead, I should allow/disallow access
by MAC address, and return visitors will not have
to change anything.

So, at least for now, I have turned off WEP, though
there probably is some value in having my communication
with the router encrypted.

I did not have an easy time getting WEP set up with my
Linksys card, however I did get it set up under Windows 2000,
so I concluded it was a Linux driver issue.

In the past [1], I have had trouble with the standard pcmcia-cs
orinoco_cs driver for the Linksys WPC11. I have been using wvlan0,
but the version of the driver I had (I don't know which version :(
was not working with WEP enabled.

So I tried to install the linux-wlan-ng Debian package, which
various resources on the Web suggested supported WEP and my
card. However, the package does not seem complete: I see no
signs of the prism2_cs driver and I could not get a driver
to load successfully from wlan-ng. I downloaded the source
and couldn't compile, so I gave up.

Instead, I upgraded pcmcia-source to version 3.2.1-1 and
compiled locally. This version of the orinoco_cs driver
supports WEP and I was able to connect. However, I do see
a few messages with dmesg that read:

    eth1: Error -5 writing packet to BAP

So my troubles may not be over.

Many thanks to Ted for helping me work through this!

 _ Ian

Summary of version info:

Kernel version: 2.4.16
Linksys router: BEFW11P1
Linksys wireless card: WPC11
pcmcia-source:  3.2.1-1

[1] http://www.w3.org/2002/02/mid/[email protected];list=w3t-sys

--
Ian Jacobs ([email protected])   http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
Tel:                     +1 718 260-9447