Accessing WEP protected networks with ipw2200 + wpa_supplicant

[Tony Schlemmer]

I've got a Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop with the built in Intel 2915 "Centrino" 
WIFI and I'm seeing problems when I try to access a WEP protected network 
when the "wpa_supplicant" daemon is running. I'm running SuSE 9.2 and it 
includes version 0.12 of the ipw2200. Before upgrading to the latest Intel 
driver I had issues even getting a connection to a WPA protected network. 

I upgraded the driver, firmware and so I now have the following running on my 
laptop:

ipw2200 1.0.3
firmware 2.2
wpa_supplicant 0.4.0

My only remaining problem is that when I connect to a network that's using WEP 
instead of WPA, the association only lasts for a few seconds and then it's 
lost. My workaround for now is to manually kill the "wpa_supplicant" daemon, 
disable it so it doesn't get started and I when I restart the network 
services on my laptop.

In searching through the archives it looks like this is a known problem with 
the Intel driver and not the "wpa_supplicant" daemon. The previous thread 
mentions this problem was with version 1.0.1 of the ipw2200 driver and it 
looks like it's an issue with the 1.0.3 driver as well.

Anthony
 
-- 
Anthony Schlemmer
aschlemm at comcast.net