SMC2632W Wireless PCMCIA card work with WEP?

**Leomania** · 10-13-2003, 04:56 PM

Greetings.

My first post; I'm a Knoppix as well as Debian newbie who just did a HDD install on a laptop. It's working perfectly and looks great.

However, I'd like to get my PCMCIA 802.11b card to run with encryption enabled. My access point and wireless cards are running wide open right now due to the problems I've had in the past trying (and failing) to get WEP working under Mandrake 9.0. I've used Google to search for info on how to get this to work, all to no avail. Always go back to no WEP.

Has anyone successfully gotten this to work on this (very common) SMC card?

Thanks,

- Leo

**CivilEng** · 10-13-2003, 05:14 PM

You should be able to do this with no problem at all. SMC supports Linux in for it's wireless products. Also, have you considered restricting which MAC addresses can access your WAP? It's a pretty simplistic, but fairly sound, security measure to put in place as a stop-gap while you search for howtos and advice on specific set-ups for your situation.

Good Luck,

Civ

**Leomania** · 10-13-2003, 05:21 PM

Thanks for the tip; I was just informed by a friend about this feature and it seems pretty solid to keep me marginally safe for awhile. I'll give it a try tonight.

- Leo

**CivilEng** · 10-13-2003, 06:08 PM

Pretty solid, yes; Flawless, no. But it will deter the casual wardrivers and even semi-capable hackers.

Let us know how it goes,

Civ

**Leomania** · 10-13-2003, 07:44 PM

Will do.

Something that I'm curious about in terms of the driver is whether Knoppix is using the linux_wlan_ng drivers. I had looked into using these when my laptop was running Mandrake 9.0, but looking into how to get them included scared me off (looked like time sink extrordinaire). I haven't looked into it in a long time so I don't know if these drivers made their way into various distros (including Knoppix) yet.

- Leo

**efflandt** · 12-14-2003, 03:03 AM

I have SMC 2632W with wlan-ng (prism2_cs) and WEP working in SuSE 8.0, so I know that it does work (using it at this moment). But that is using external instead of kernel pcmcia.

Knoppix has /etc/pcmcia/wlan-ng* related files and prism2_cs module, and I have modified copies of /etc/modules.conf, /etc/pcmcia/config.opts and /etc/pcmcia/wlan-nt.opts to make prism2_cs load automatically. But there seems to be something in the system not communicating, because wlan0 is created (shows up in ifconfig -a) and I can assign an IP address to it, but it shows all zeros for HWaddr and cannot be brought up.

It could be that prism2_cs does not communicate with yenta_socket. So tried to configure pcmcia to load i82365 instead (which SuSE successfully uses), but knoppix rejects that due to an error and loads yenta anyway. Even booting with 'knoppix nopcmcia' and attempting to modprobe or insmod pcmcia modules in the proper order gave an error attempting to load i82365. So I have to look around the forums (maybe Laptops) to see if anyone has wlan-ng working.