WEP key for wireless takes only uppercase

[Kristoffer Lundén]

(Dapper Flight 3 install CD)

During the installation, if I want to use the wireless network card on a WEP protected WAN, the instructions are very unclear:

Suggested forms are either numbers in the form of 'nnnn-nnnn-nn', or 'nn:nn:nn:nn:nn:nn:nn' or 'nnnnnnn' or as a passphrase, prepended with 's:'. None of these seemed to fit the bill, as my WEP key looks something like this: "d75ad0d1cd83b92fbabcae7acf", a 26 characters long hex string. And sure enough, no rewriting in any form made it work.

Until I finally tried it - as it stood - but in uppercase. This is very unintiutive, because:
* It doesn't need to be uppercase when configuring router, or in a finished installation of either Ubuntu or Windows
* There is no instruction about this, in fact, the example form is lower case 'n'.

Suggestions:

1. If the network needs an uppercase key to work, silently uppercase it before sending it.
2. Alternatively, update instructions to explain this, and preferably provide better examples.

Alternative #1 is much preferable, although the examples could be a bit better also.

[Kristoffer Lundén (kristoffer-lunden)]

Another thing: would it be possible to remember this entered string and setup the network accordingly after the install? Or should that be a separate bug?

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

re: remember entered WEP key

That's probably a separate bug.

[Sebastian Rode (sebastian-ro-deactivatedaccount)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering is this still an issue for you? Can you try with latest Ubuntu release? Thanks in advance.

[Kristoffer Lundén (kristoffer-lunden)]

This bug has been long forgotten and buried. I have no idea if that part of the installer even exists anymore (maybe the server install?)

As far as I'm concerned you might as well close it and let someone reopen it if they have the issue.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

As far as I can see, nothing has changed with regard to this bug (looking at the netcfg source in jaunty) and it should remain open.

[Tormod Volden (tormodvolden)]

I _think_ most network cards (or the driver stack) do the uppercasing themselves (or don't need it). Kristoffer, which card (and driver) did you use? IMHO, wherever the conversion hex string -> bytes is done, it should be made case insensitive.

[Kristoffer Lundén (kristoffer-lunden)]

It was a long time ago, but it *should* be this card (from lspci), with whatever default driver Dapper Flight 3 chose for it:

01:03.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 2200BG [Calexico2] Network Connection (rev 05)

The driver it uses now is 'ipw2200' but I have no idea about back then.

The card is built in on a Fujitsu Siemens Amilo M3438G laptop, and I'm reasonably sure that I filed this report when I tried my first Ubuntu install on it. My bad for not including all info back then.

As I said, this doesn't affect me anymore, but if you need more info that I can provide, just ask. :)