Access Point: Invalid on iwconfig?

[gizzmoe]

I just installed Dapper (was using Breezy) and now my wireless doesn't work. It says it's enabled, but when i run iwconfig it says Access Point invalid. And I can't get any DHCP offers when running dhclient.

In breezy, i was using the newest version of ndiswrapper to get my wireless adapter working, so i removed all the ndiswrapper stuff from dapper and installed the newest version just like i had done in breezy and i still get the same results after configuring everything.

Also...when i run iwlist eth1 scan, it says it can't find anything.

Another note: when in breezy, my wireless showed up as wlan0, if that matters..

Any ideas? I'm stumped...

[chrishack14]

Re: Access Point: Invalid on iwconfig?

I had the same problem. The way Kubuntu handles wireless connections apparently changed quite drastically in Dapper. If you want to use ndiswrapper, you can, but at a minimum you will need to add "blacklist bcm43xx" to the end of the file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

Once you do that, reboot, and you will theoretically have your wlan0 back, I think. However, I tried this and was unable to get it to work correctly with iwconfig (couldn't specify essid or access point), so it didn't work for me. If you're still having trouble, there is an alternative to ndiswrapper that is covered in a howto thread over at ubuntuforums.com. Just run a search for "broadcom dapper" and it's easy to find. This goes through how to setup bcm43xx-fwcutter, and it seems to work better for me. I still can't obtain an IP address from any of the dhcop server here at the university I attend, but I suspect that is a problem with their server, not with my system, because after the following the bcm43xx-fwcutter tutorial my interface does work and I can at least find available networks and set the essid, ap, etc. parameters in iwconfig... I'll let you know if I come up with a definite, clear-cut solution.

Oh, and a couple more things. First, what card model do you have, out of curiosity, and secondly, if you run

dmesg | grep eth1

dmesg | grep wlan0

dmesg | grep ndiswrapper

dmesg | grep bcm

what output do you get from those? Finally, even if you get your wireless card up and running, I have found that you need to run

sudo iwconfig eth1 ap any

and possibly even specify an essid and ap in iwconfig before it will stop saying that the access point is "Invalid".

That may or may not help. A lot of people seem to be having a lot of trouble with this, but hopefully we'll all get it figured out sooner or later. Let us know what you come up with.