OpenWRT WPA Gives Me Problems... and WEP Works!

So I thought WPA was working perfectly. But then it started dropping out on me every now and then. I can't find a pattern to it. But I did leave the SSH connection to the router open on my desktop and the error message "wl0: Invalid argument" was displayed repeatedly.

Sometimes the connection get reestablished after a while. Sometimes I get impatient and reboot the router.

So I gave the instructions for WEP setup on OpenWRT Kamikaze one more try, except this time instead of using my old WEP key I followed all the steps and generated a new key as instructed. And now 128-bit WEP works! I'll have to see if it's stable but I'm hopeful.

Also, "Encryption key:<too big>" still appears when I run "iwconfig". Maybe 128-bit key is too big to display in what they allocated for the field to use? I dunno.

OpenWRT WEP Trouble

I had some trouble with enabling 128-bit WEP encryption on OpenWRT Kamikaze 7.09 (kernel 2.4). I'd run iwconfig and see "Encryption key:<too big>" but could not figure out how the key could be too big as I entered into "/etc/config/wireless" file, under "key" option, a 26-digit hexadecimal number as the WEP key.

As to be expected someone else ran into the same problem and discussed it in OpenWRT Forum and references a link with the solution. The solution did not work for me, though.

So I followed the instructions here to use WPA instead of WEP. It's working great. Don't know why WEP wouldn't work.

Afterthought: The router I am using is Linksys WRT54GL v1.1. I didn't try WPA2.

OpenWRT

Installed OpenWRT on my wireless router (Linksys WRT54GL). Default firmware from Linksys wouldn't do DHCP and static IP allocation at the same time. At least I couldn't find a way to do it.

Default installation of OpenWRT does not come with an HTTP server so all configuration is done over SSH sessions. I could always install a web server with configuration manager but it works well as it is.

Spent a good chunk of my time with configuration. One problem I had was that I was following instructions for configuring a previous version - White Russian - rather than the current - Kamikaze. Information on getting Kamikaze to do what you want seems rather fragmented. Might be because it's new.

Plan to get it to update DynDNS domain and forward some ports to my desktop.

The desktop was given a static IP by configuring DHCP on the router. I found a discussion about setting up and troubleshooting static IP addresses. I configured dnsmasq by adding MAC-IP address mapping in /etc/ethers file (and made it readable by user "nobody").

Other links:
Configuring DHCP and DNS on OpenWRT