Anteru's blog
  • Consulting
  • Research
    • Assisted environment probe placement
    • Assisted texture assignment
    • Error Metrics for Smart Image Refinement
    • High-Quality Shadows for Streaming Terrain Rendering
    • Hybrid Sample-based Surface Rendering
    • Interactive rendering of Giga-Particle Fluid Simulations
    • Quantitative Analysis of Voxel Raytracing Acceleration Structures
    • Real-time Hybrid Hair Rendering
    • Scalable rendering for very large meshes
    • Subpixel Reconstruction Antialiasing
    • Tiled light trees
  • About
  • Archive

Cannot connect to WPA-PSK2 protected WLAN on Linux ...

January 25, 2010
  • General
  • Linux
approximately 1 minutes to read

The title says it all. I had a machine here with a really old WLAN adapter (Realtek RTL-8185L on a PCMCIA card), and it wouldn’t connect to my local WLAN when using WPA-PSK2. I just checked that WLAN was working at all, and yes, it would connect without a pass-phrase, but with a key, it wouldn’t work. Each time, the authentication would simply fail due to a wrong password. The Linux was Ubuntu 9.10, but I guess it’ll be the same on other ones as well.

One weird issue was that the GNOME applet for entering the network key would refuse my 63 character key, and only let my type in 60 characters. Turns out that the problem is that for WPA-PSK, the key required to authenticate is not your pass-phrase, but generated from the pass-phrase and the SSID, and some drivers don’t do this transformation for you, so you have to help out by hand. That’s very easy, for instance by using wpa_passphrase. This gives you the PSK, and on entering this one instead of the pass-phrase, everything worked right away. Woho!

Previous post
Next post

Recent posts

  • Five years of GPU DB
    Posted on 2020-09-27
  • Enabling SSL in your local network
    Posted on 2020-05-17
  • Goodbye, Bitbucket!
    Posted on 2020-03-19
  • QEMU, KVM and trim
    Posted on 2020-01-26
  • Fixing network after Ubuntu 19.04 to 19.10 upgrade
    Posted on 2019-10-26
  • Older posts

Find me on the web

  • GitHub
  • GPU database
  • Projects

Follow me

NIV_Anteru

Contents © 2005-2021 | Anteru | Imprint/Impressum | Privacy policy/Datenschutz