Thank you - NM works well with D-Link WNA-2330 adapter and WPA2 OpenWRT router

["Michael [Plouj] Ploujnikov" <ploujj gmail com>]

Hello,
I just want to say thank-you to the developers and other people
involved in making NM what it is today.
I was struggling to improve and secure my home network while still
allowing my brother to connect his Ubuntu 6.10 laptop to the network
without wires. The easy part of the equation was purchasing a OpenWRT
supported router. The hard part was replacing the laptop's old PCMCIA
Linksys WPC11 v3 802.11b adapter with something that can do WPA rather
than WEP. I tried a few different PCMCIA adapters, but what I could
get either didn't support any encryption other than the flawed WEP or
it just didn't have stable Linux drivers. The last card which I tried
was D-Link WNA-2330 [1]. I purchased it from a big box store
Futureshop [2] (so I could always return it if it didn't work) and it
supports WPA2. It worked out of the box on Ubuntu with the madwifi
drivers. It successfully established a WPA2 encrypted connection to a
test router with proprietary Linksys firmware. However, I was only
able to establish a WEP encrypted link to my WRT router. For some
reason, in WPA mode the client adapter de-associated from the router
seconds after being connected. I was ready to give up trying to debug
the issue and even started considering setting up some kind of an
encrypted tunnel on top of a WEP connection when someone suggested
that I give NetworkManager a try. To my surprise the installation and
configuration went smoother than I expected. I didn't have to compile
anything, nor tweak any config files (not that I mind). I didn't even
have to configure NM to run automatically at the next boot. All I had
to do was click to select my network out of the discovered list,
select the encryption type and type in the passkey (and type in a
keyring password). Everything worked so well, that the (relatively)
worst annoyance was the keyring access prompt at each logon. After a
couple of days of smooth operation my brother was very happy with the
wireless connection because it was faster than his old 802.11b
adapter, and I was happy now that my home network was secured by WPA2
encryption rather than WEP. Finally, I was even able to get rid of the
keyring annoyance too [3].

Thanks a lot for making a great solution for non-technical users using
Linux on laptops!


[1] - http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=472&sec=0
[2] - http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/proddetail.asp?logon=&langid=EN&sku_id=0665000FS10080887&catid=19997
[3] - http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=192281

P.S. I'm not subscribed to this mailing list.

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