Wicd fails to connect to WEP networks

weylik · n00b Joined: 21 May 2015 Posts: 6 Location: Somerset

Hello.

I have an Intel Wireless Card (iwlwifi) and I am trying to connect to a WEP network I own. My other network which uses WPA2 connection works fine and I can connect no problem. I am certain that my WEP key is correct as it works in Windows and in Wicd I have tried every combination of WEP Hex/Shared/Passphrase with the WEP key which is 10 mixed letters and numbers. Each attempt to connect gives an authentication error despite it being the correct passphrase. I have tried all forms of 'WEP Index' from 0 - 3 (but I've never seen this before so I'm not sure what I'm doing).

Is there anything that could possibly be wrong on my end? I have all necessary drivers installed (I think) and up to date. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.

szatox · Advocate Joined: 27 Aug 2013 Posts: 3495

Wicd doesn't set key itself, do you use wpa_supplicant or some other helper? Is there anything interesting in /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf?
Is the password set on your NIC of the correct length? You know, whatever (string type) password you have it should be hashed to predefined size based on which wersion you use, but it might still be possible to set an arbitrary value as a key. It gave me a serious headache long time ago :oops:

Also, wep is a poor choice. Provides no security, conflicts with N extention... Why won't you move to WPA (or disable encryption if you don't care)?

weylik · n00b Joined: 21 May 2015 Posts: 6 Location: Somerset

Thanks for the reply, you've certainly helped.

My wpa_supplicant.conf is the standard set up from the wiki so nothing out of the ordinary there. Your post led to me doing a lot of searching and I've managed to get WEP working at last but it's not ideal. I killed Wicd and used iwconfig + dhcpcd to configure my network and it works fine with this however, it is not persistent across reboots and it's a bother to keep doing evry time I use my PC. If there is any way to get this to automatically connect then if you could let me know that would be great. I'm not sure why Wicd only works with WPA, usually it's hard to get WPA working.

As for the security, I'm in a rural area so while I don't want my network to be completely open I don't have teenagers with aircrack-ng on their laptops near me so I'm not too concerned about that.

charles17 · Advocate Joined: 02 Mar 2008 Posts: 3685

weylik · n00b Joined: 21 May 2015 Posts: 6 Location: Somerset

Well I give up with Wicd, I've tried just about everything I can with bot wpa_supplicant and Wocd but nothing seems to want to accept the WEP key in the form of a passphrase. I've had to install NetworkManager which works fine with it so I guess I'll be sticking to that provided nothing changes.

Thanks for helping anyways!

eccerr0r · Posted: Fri May 29, 2015 7:52 pm Post subject:

The passphrase is a weird item. Ultimately it needs to be hashed into the keysize your network uses. Unfortunately I don't know of the CLI hash routine and it has to match whatever your router uses.

If you chose a hex key instead of a passphrase, I suspect things would work (that's what I did when I was using WEP).

I suspect that NM knows the correct has routine and theoretically you can grab the hash and use that key with wpa_supplicant directly.
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