Certainly, WPA is the way to go (though that's been cracked somewhat easily too using video cards' vector capabilities from what I hear). Regardless, there are WEP access points, and people do only know the passphrase. Do you suggest that this should go for iwconfig rather than netcfg? I technically agree. Ah, Daenyth's e-mail just came in. I can try to do something with the iwconfig guys, but honestly, adding passphrase support is pretty trivial and I must wonder if they haven't added it due to philosophical reasons. Guess I'll try get in touch with them and see what they say. -A"G"T On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 4:20 PM, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 3:01 PM, Andrei Thorp <garoth@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Hello there,

I was recently digging around in the netcfg code to figure out why my WEP passphrase wasn't working. As I expected, it is because iwconfig at the moment doesn't support WEP passphrase.

Anyway, so I'd like to know the reason this has not been implemented in general. Is it because the netcfg devs want it in iwconfig and the iwconfig guys don't want to write this? Is it because no one has cared enough to do it? Should I go talk about this elsewhere?

Anyway, I personally think that netcfg could use this feature, and that it'd be dead simple to implement. I figured I'd do it while I'm on break, but I wanted to confirm that this is indeed a feature that wasn't being avoided for some reason. If it is a feature that is being avoided, can I at least write a small patch to tell the user what's the haps? (At the moment, netcfg tries to use the improper passphrase by passing a command to iwconfig and then iwconfig throws out a cryptic "unknown command" error.)

Well, technically this has nothing to do with netcfg. If you patch iwconfig to support it, the patch would go upstream and netcfg would "just work", it seems.

That said, isn't WEP all sorts of broken? I was under the impression WPA was the way to go these days

Ah, I see. Well, in that case, guess there isn't really anything to be done, aside from perhaps updating a netcfg example to include this. This is why I like to ask first :) -AT On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 4:35 PM, Jeff Mickey <jeff@archlinux.org> wrote:

The problem is slightly larger than iwconfig support or lack thereof. WEP passphrases are merely keys to hash into the hex encryption code. iwconfig _will_ allow you to use an ascii representation of the hex:

iwconfig wlan0 key s:somepasswd

But there is no guarantee that your router is merely using the ascii as the hex, it could also be hashing on the MS Windows algorithm.

Try putting "s:blahblah" in the KEY part for netcfg, and see if it works for you.

 //  jeff

Cool, thanks :) -AT On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 5:57 PM, James Rayner <iphitus@iphitus.org> wrote:

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 6:41 AM, Andrei Thorp <garoth@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Ah, I see.

Well, in that case, guess there isn't really anything to be done, aside from perhaps updating a netcfg example to include this.

This is why I like to ask first :)

I have an FR to add an example for this. I believe I have one in git, but not the current release. I _think_ it might also be mentioned on the wiki page somewhere too.

James