[H-GEN] Wireless networking under Debian stable

[gavin duley]

Hello,

just been having some troubles with wireless networking on a Linux  
laptop. It was running Ubuntu, but I've recently changed to Debian. In  
neither have I really been able to get the wireless network to work.

My guess is that the problem is with WPA encryption. I can get the  
laptop to join the network okay when I have WPA encryption turned off,  
but not when it's turned on.

Here are the error messages from ifup eth0

frodo:/home/helen# ifup eth0
ioctl[SIOCSIWAUTH]: Operation not supported
WEXT auth param 7 value 0x1 - Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client V3.0.4
Copyright 2004-2006 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/sw/dhcp/

eth0: unknown hardware address type 801
eth0: unknown hardware address type 801
Listening on LPF/eth0/
Sending on   LPF/eth0/
Sending on   Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 8
DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 14
DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 15
DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 13
DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 11
No DHCPOFFERS received.
No working leases in persistent database - sleeping.
RTNETLINK answers: File exists
run-parts: /etc/network/if-up.d/avahi-autoipd exited with return code 2
frodo:/home/helen#

Here is what I have in /etc/network/interfaces:
# Wireless ethernet
allow-hotplug eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
wpa-ssid STATION-NAME
#psk=
wpa-psk [passphrase in hexedecimal]

The card I'm using is a PCMCIA D-Link DWL-650. From some googleing, it  
seems that not all revisions of this card work with WPA so this could  
be my problem. However, I'm hoping it's not that.

If I have encryption turned off on the wireless network, and set up a  
MAC address based Wireless card access list, then the network would be  
reasonably secure from unauthorised use. I guess this is one  
alternative if I can't get WPA to work with this computer. I'm not  
very happy about using unencrypted wifi like this though. I guess the  
possibility that the neighbors have nothing better to do than packet  
sniffing and are desperate to read my email is fairly remote, but I'm  
a little paranoid.

Is there any chance that I should be able to get WPA working with this  
card under Linux? Or should I just not be so paranoid about  
unencrypted wireless.

Any suggestions welcome

thanks

gavin,


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