PC-BSD

Hello all,

Need to get some help with a wireless issue that is causing me no end of grief with the latest release of PCBSD.

My card is a NetGear WG311T V3 PCI card which works no problems under Linux for years, on installing PC-BSD last night i was up till just before midnight trying to get the damn card to get an IP address with no luck.

The card sees the wireless router and also says that it hs been authorised so the password is correct but it will not obtain an IP lease from the server for soem reason.

I've read throught the forums and foudn the post concerning the Linksys card that was caused by the WEP key not bien in HEX format and I've tried that to no avail. When I check /etc/rc.conf the card is specified correctly with the WEP key prefixed with '0x' as per all the other information I can find.

Strange thing is that in the network config for the card, it seems to report that the netmask is 255.255.0 as opposed to be 255.255.255.0 which is what it should be for a C Class network...

Can anyone tell me how to manually specify the netmask through the configuration files if that will help with the resolution?

I'm a BSD newbie but have a good few years experience with inux under my belt so I can handle most things that come my way. Thanks in advance for any advice...

Regards,



Andrew.

Firstly, you should carefully read

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO885 ... eless.html

man wlan, man ifconfig

Also you should man wpa_supplicant and man wpa_supplicant.conf

Cheers,
OKO

Hi Oko,

Thank you for your reply, you have save me countless hours of further frustration and finally I managed to get an IP lease

Here's what the problem and solution was:

I was trying to connect to my router using WEP which I had been able to connect to under Linux and my wife's computer has also been able to connect to under "Windoze" with as well no problems.

Because WEP had been working with no issues I had never seen the need to change the encryption to WPA or anything else. BSD by design appears to not allow any form of connection with a protocol less than WPA (which is good) easily.

Once I changed the router to use WPA-PSK everything worked with no problems.

Again, thank you Oko for your advice pointing me to the relevant information about wireless connections under BSD!

Actually FreeBSD supports WEP protocol but you made a very wise decision to move
your WI network to WPA. Just look carefully one more time link I gave you if you want to learn about WEP on FreeBSD.

WEP protocol could be hacked into within 10 seconds so it serves no other purpose but preventing accidental connection by your neighbours to you WI network.

WPA is not entirely safe but I think OpenVPN or even better IPsec would be overkill for your situation.

I am glad it worked out