I'm trying to set up my unstable Debian laptop for Wireless networking. I have ndiswrapper set up and working. I can use wireless as long as I turn off the encryption. The problem is, when I set the WEP on the router, I can't get Linux to do anything with it.

I use iwconfig wlan0 key MYKEY to set the key. Running iwconfig reports that the key is being used. But when I run ifup wlan0, it keeps trying to do DHCP, but to no avail.

Another thing I don't understand is that when I set the WEP on the router, iwconfig no longer lets me change the essid. It goes to "off/any", and stays like that.

I am using kernel 2.6.10. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Well without an essid you can't connect cause it won't be able to figure out which network to connect to and it won't get allowed either. Is this the problem or is your essid shown when you try with the wep key?

Unfortunately I can't help you much more as I haven't played around with WEP much However did you compile the newest ndiswrapper from source or did you use a debian package? If you used a debian package and there's a newer ndiswrapper source package available it might be worth a try.

Also I think a search on this forum might turn up some results as well as I've seen a few of these kind of threads around.

No, I'm not running the most recent version of ndiswrapper. I've tried it, but the module wouldn't load, so I gave up.

I figured it out, though. I ended up setting it to open instead of restricted. Don't know why it worked, but it did.

Concerning ifup, i just found a typo in my ifup-wireless file. I'm using SuSE 9.2 prof and the typo is on line 317 where WIRELESS is spelled WIRLEESS. Don't know how significant this is - i still can't get the linux driver for my wireless card (Rayllink RT2500) to work - but i'm sure it wasn't helping. You might want to take a look at your file. And BTW if anyone has any suggestions to get the RT2500 driver to work i can use help.

jim