The Treehouse Blog

Awhile ago I finally upgraded my home wireless network (a single WAP54G v2) from TKIP to AES.  This has been something on the to-do list since I got rid of the Axim (which wouldn’t support AES).  I tested my two wireless client devices – a laptop and my G1, and they seemed fine at the time.  All was well.

Later I noticed that the G1 was not functioning on my home network, yet worked on other similarly secured networks I connect to.  It would connect, obtain an IP address, but not pass traffic – which is a pretty bad scenario since the G1 wouldn’t automatically fail back to its GSM data connection.  I did the typical troubleshooting with “forget”-ing the network and reconnecting, etc, but this was unsuccessful.  More detailed analysis showed that almost immediately after DHCP completed successfully, the G1 would see no traffic generated from the network, and the network would see no traffic generated by the G1.  With the laptop working fine through all of this, it really seemed to be a problem with the G1.

After essentially exhausting other options, I turned my attention to the WAP.  I tried changing the SSID which didn’t help, and reverting back to TKIP, which worked fine.  I then decided to upgrade the WAP’s firmware, from 2.07 (2004 era) to 3.04 (2005 era – still 5 years old!).  The wireless security settings are more granular than the former version – and after reconfiguring – the G1 works on AES.

Hopefully this time it will keep working.

I’ve spent maybe 10 hours on this now (not all this week, mind you, but still). Getting WPA-PSK w/ TKIP certainly isn’t as easy as it should be, but that is probably entirely due to driver issues. Seems you can’t buy a great 802.11g card for Linux.

I had tried various versions of the Linux IPW2100 drivers, 1.1.0 most recently, and always ended up getting errors saying that the IPW_IOCTL_WPA_SUPPLICANT ioctl was not available. This is a symptom of a driver that doesn’t have the WPA support, but lsmod clearly showed the TKIP and other encryption-related modules loaded. Google suggested using the load and unload scripts provided with the driver, and to check the initrd for an old driver that might be overriding the freshly-compiled one. modinfo confirmed that the new drivers were getting loaded… still no luck. That’s where I was for a long time, retrying every once in awhile to see if anything was happier.

As it turns out, there is a problem in the way the drivers are compiled as modules which can be fixed with this patch (local cache). Keep in mind that the post I’m referencing here is only two weeks old… so, I’m probably not the only one having this issue. I’m somewhat amazed (and very happy) that Google has indexed it that fast.

Now, technically, that was enough to fix my problems. However, I spent the next 45 minutes or so trying to figure out why my connection would reset several seconds after coming up… which turned out to be another instance of wpa_supplicant in the background screwing things up. Tip: run one wpa_supplicant at a time.