[ale] Ubuntu woes

[Michael H. Warfield]

On Sun, 2006-08-06 at 18:18 -0400, Jim Popovitch wrote:
> What's the state of Ubuntu wireless networking (WAP, not WEP, and things 
> like TKIP+AES, etc.)?

	Ok...  I'm not a real big Ubuntu pilot, so others may have a better
answer than this...

	Ubuntu has wpa_supplicant installed.  That supports WPA and WPA2.  They
also make reference to wpa_supplicant and wpa_client in their write-ups
for their profession certification, so it would seem it's not just
dumped on the CD and not integrated in some manner.  So my conclusion is
that Ubuntu must support WPA, it's just a matter of figuring out how.
That being said, I haven't run wpa_supplicant on Ubuntu, only on Fedora
Core.  I have also noticed that some drivers require you to specify the
ESSID of the access point or wpa_supplicant fails to find them (I
believe this is due to limited scan capabilities in some individual card
drivers).  The man page on wpa_supplicant can give you more information
on the types of cards it supports.

> I just installed Ubuntu on a new laptop (T60p) and it installed 
> wonderfully well... up until I wanted to use networking.   I've also 
> noticed that wired network can only be configured manually, dhclient 
> fails to pull an IP.

	That is very definitely not correct.  I've got Ubuntu running in a
VMware virtual machine and dhclient has no problem drawing down an IP
address.  Does dhclient run when you bring up the interface?  I haven't
had any trouble with this at all, but it may be driver/card dependent.

> The Ubuntu forums are full of similar issues/complaints, but no 
> solutions.  Am I a fool to think that networking should work out of the 
> box with an up to date Linux distro? ;-)

	It does work out of the box, in my experience.  Maybe it has something
to do with your specific setup?  I'm not familiar with that laptop
model.  Are we talking built-in wireless and/or wired?  Are these PCMCIA
cards?  Are the cards getting recognized and drivers loaded?
PARTICULARLY with wireless cards, you could easily be having a driver
problem.  Is this 802.11b?  802.11g?  Native drivers (the native bcm43xx
drivers are, errr, problematically)?  Ndiswrapper?

> -Jim P.

	BTW...  I see it's now up on the ALE site, but I will be speaking on
the current state of Wireless Security at the ALE Central meeting this
Thursday on the Emory Campus.  That will be the same talk I'm delivering
this evening at the Atlanta Unix Users Group at the HP building near
Perimeter Mall.

	Regards,
	Mike
-- 
Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 985-6132 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
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