[jlherren]

Hello everyone!

I'm trying to encrypt a wireless network using WPA and it's working fine on all machines (one Vista, one Linux), excepted on a XP SP3 machine. After booting that machine, it properly connects to the network, no problem. But when I send it to either standby or hibernation and wake it up again, or use the little wireless switch on the front side, it will not connect anymore. If any of these things happen, it will still properly list all available wireless networks, but when trying to connect, it will get stuck. It says "Connecting...", "Getting IP address..." and then disconnects and it repeats this forever. Using wireshark on the linux machine, I can see that it never really enters the network to send any DHCP requests. So I guess it must be a problem with the encryption, because it does that even when I enter a wrong password. After rebooting the machine, it always connects fine, until I it wakes up from standby/hibernation again. Odd enough, if I don't encrypt the network, then there's absolutely no problem at all.

It's also worth noting that WPA2 is not available in the list of encryptions, even though SP3 is supposed to add support for it.

The wifi card in question is "802.11g MiniPCI Wireless Network Adapter" inside a MAXDATA XPNO16/A02. The driver version dates back to 2004, but there's no newer one available. I've already tried to uninstall the driver and reinstall it.

Any hints? Thanks in advance.

[JohnWill]

Look in the properties of the wireless adapter in Device Manager, uncheck any power saving options. For a driver that old, hibernation may simply not work, but you might get standby working.

FWIW, I've had a variety of issues getting standby to recover properly from old notebooks, it seems that many times their drivers simply weren't up to the task.

As far as WPA2, you need hardware changes to the wireless adapter for that to work, it's not just a driver issue. WPA is as good as it gets for hardware that old.

[jlherren]

Originally Posted by JohnWill

Look in the properties of the wireless adapter in Device Manager, uncheck any power saving options.

Already did that, they're all disabled, respectively set to 'always-on'.

For a driver that old, hibernation may simply not work.

I'm not sure I'd agree, because the network connection resumes without any problem after hibernation and standby as long as I don't use encryption on the wireless network.

As far as WPA2, you need hardware changes to the wireless adapter for that to work, it's not just a driver issue. WPA is as good as it gets for hardware that old.

I see, thanks.

[JohnWill]

I'm thinking the driver is perhaps forgetting the encryption key, which is the root of the problem after the adapter goes inactive.

[jlherren]

It doesn't work either if I enter the key again. Actually, after this problem happened, I have found no way of ever getting it to work again, excepted for two things: (1) Reboot, or (2) disable the encryption of the network.

[JohnWill]

I don't have an answer to the encryption issue. You can run with encryption disabled and use MAC filtering. It's not as secure, but it's better than nothing.

If this were my machine, I'd buy a PCMCIA wireless card that properly supports encryption and standby and disable the internal wireless capability.

[jlherren]

Thanks for the tip about MAC filtering, actually that's what I'm using now already. It's not only not secure because people can sniff; if they're clever they can clone a MAC and enter the network.

[JohnWill]

Correct, that's why I always recommend the highest level your network can support. In your case, that may be it.