HostAP and WPA2 with Intersil Prism card

Alex Pounds alex at alexpounds.com
Tue Dec 12 07:20:32 EST 2006


Hello,

First up, let me explain that I am pretty ignorant of the world of wireless
networking. I've tried to find the answer to my question from the
documentation, but a lot of it seems tied to using HostAP to build an access
point, and a lot of it goes over my head.

I have a small home wireless network - just my desktop PC, in fact, which
uses a LinkSys router attached to the ADSL for its internet connection. The
router uses WPA2 for security. I have recently purchased a laptop that has
an Intersil Prism 2.5 card (see lspci output at
http://www.ethicsgirls.com/stuff/lspci.txt -
http://www.ethicsgirls.com/stuff/dmesg.txt may also be of some use) that
does not support WPA in-hardware.

My question is simple: Can I use hostAP to do the WPA2 part in software, and
thus use my laptop with my home network? If so, how? I've been told
conflicting things about wpa_supplicant (story 1: It needs hardware support.
Story 2: Hardware support is not neccessary, it needs driver support) and on
the whole I am hugely confused. If someone can let me know if this is
possible and point me to some simple documentation on how to set it up, I'd
be most grateful.

Thank you,

-- 
Alex Pounds (Creature)                  .~.         http://www.alexpounds.com/
                                        /V\        http://www.ethicsgirls.com/
                                       // \\
"Variables won't; Constants aren't"   /(   )\
                                       ^`~'^




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