I'm using ipw3945-1.2.0 and kernel 2.6.19-r4 (ieee80211 external module never applied to this set of kernel source). I enabled all of the options that ipw3945-1.2.0 demanded, and it worked for connecting to unencrypted networks (aside from ipw3945d-1.7.22-r4 not working for me, reported in a separate bug), but it claims that the network device doesn't support setting a WEP key. I then build the kernel module for WEP support, installed it, and rebooted, but I still don't get WEP support. I think I also tried rebuilding ipw3945-1.2.0 with the WEP option enabled in the kernel, but I'm not sure I got that far, because ipw3945d breakage may have sidetracked me from testing this effectively. I then completely messed up my 2.6.19-r4 source trying to get the older ipw3945 to work with it, and then went back to older versions of everything for the night and so I could get network, so I'll be starting from scratch in my next attempt. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce:
Reopen with some logs output and kernel .config, we really can't guess.
In dmesg I get: ieee80211_crypt_wep: could not allocate crypto API arc4 wireless: could not initialize WEP: load module ieee80211_crypt_wep From /etc/init.d/net.wireless start: Error for wireless request "Set Encode" (8B2A) : SET failed on device wireles ; Operation not supported. * wireless does not support setting keys * or the parameter "mac_key_newWLAN" and "key_newWLAN" is incorrect
Created attachment 110355 [details] .config
It turns out that the crypto API module auto-loading support is defective. It works if I load "cryptomgr" and "ecb" (I already had arc4 loaded, so I don't know if it handles that). I'm reporting this upstream, but a workaround or at least a note to users would be helpful to future people with this issue.
Turns out that I didn't have CONFIG_KMOD enabled, and module dependancies and udev were taking care of so much that I didn't realize that the kernel wasn't autoloading anything at all. It really comes down to confusing messages and comments for this case: the message from wep only mentions arc4, when it needs other things as well (which I think used to be inherent to the crypto system), and the core stuff doesn't give any feedback that it needs some particular module and autoloading isn't enabled. It's also kind of confusing that wep selects ecb and cryptomgr in kbuild, but doesn't depend on them in depmod, and doesn't select KMOD, so you've got these modules installed because of wep, but they're still not available to wep.
Thanks for the report, although as you have observed, this isn't a bug. You wouldn't have had this problem if you had compiled the items into your kernel as opposed to as modules. Users are commonly hit by unexpected behaviour when dealing with modules since the kernel really doesn't effort to load them for you (with a couple of exceptions such as this case in part) and it is not designed to either. The kernel configuration guide has some notes on this.
