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WLAN Resources, encryption information and troubleshooting

Getting Started

There are plenty of great resources here to get your wlan network working with Ubuntu.

Probably the best place to start is the WifiDocs/WiFiHowTo.

If you don't use encryption in your wlan everything will mostly work out-of-the-box, if you want to encrypt your wlan however there are some things you need to note:

Encryption Types

WEP

Ubuntu supports WEP encryption out-of-the-box, however you might find this information usefull:

WEP 64 bit

WEP 64bit should work fine. However I had problems with setting the password via ASCII (prepend s: in the password field in hoary, or select ASCII in breezy). However it worked just fine when I enterred the password in HEX (ie: JE982X12BM).

WEP 128 bit (aka Passphrase)

I had problems with WEP 128bit encryption. It seemed to work for 15 minutes, but then disconnected me and I never was able to connect afterwards. More information may be avaiable on the web or in the forums.

WPA

See WifiDocs/WPAHowTo

For WPA on Kubuntu see WifiDocs/WPAHowTo/Kubuntu

Troubleshooting

The network manager says "activating network" but it takes very long and afterwards nothing will work

This most probably means your encryption key is wrong. How to check? Have you selected to get your IP adress from DHCP? Then this most probably is the cause. But Why? Because there is no way to check if your key is correct. We still try to get an IP adress via DHCP, but only send garbage to the network (but we don't know, since we can't check if we encrypt the things correctly). Thus the DHCP server won't recognize our request, the network manager waits until the DHCP timeout is over, but won't tell us that he failed to get an adress (not-implemented-here I assume - so complain about this wherever you can).

DHCP won't work (ie: I don't get an adress from DHCP)

This most probably means your encryption key is wrong, see the following question.

Ubuntu shows a connection quality, but I can't do anything in the network (ping, etc)

Most probably this means your encryption key is wrong. Again: there's no way to tell if it's right and this is very annoying.

CategoryNetworking CategoryWireless

WifiDocs/WLANHowTo (last edited 2009-12-30 23:48:51 by ppp-70-247-165-107)