HP Wireless driving me nuts

[plexer]

Ok I am at the point now where I am going to a hammer to a set of laptops.

I have some HP NX6325's with Broadcom 802.11a/b/g wireless cards in them I've just updated one to the latest wlan driver available from HP to see if that solves my problem but it hasn't.

Basically the laptops connect and authenticate fine via radius when in my office wihch has a Buffalo WLA-G54C access point but they fail when in the new build which has HP 420 WAP's.

We are using WPA-TKIP and EAP-TTLS

I know the HP access point is ok as I can authenticate via it using my PDA and then download emails on my pda and also another laptop with an MSI wireless mini-pci card also work fine.

There is something very strange going on using this HP laptop with an HP access point.

Any thoughts?

Ben

[plexer]

Just a little update on this for you to see where I am at now.

Apparently the 2.1.5 firmware update which I had allready applied to all my 420 wap's had a bug fix in for broadcom clients.

"Interoperability — Broadcom clients with a driver version 4.10.36.0 cannot connect with
the access point when using WPA security. (18-01176)"

Taken from the summary for the firmware.

My test client is now running driver version 4.80.28.5 and the problem still exists so I've logged a support case with HP and we'll see what happens now.

Ben

[plexer]

Another update for anyone that cares.

Yesterday I got given a beta firmware for the 420's which was hoped would fix my problem and it appears to have made it slightly better in that I can get a NX6325 to connect to the 420 briefly but it's not stable and as soon as the connection drops it doesn't want to reconnect.

This is in contrast to the buffalo WLA2-54C if I disable and renable the wireless card or put the laptop in standby and bring it out of standby the laptops reconnect to the buffalo no problems.

I'll never say a bad thing about buffalo waps again

HP said the next thing would be to send them one of the cards to test with.

I have also had the providers of the radius software look at the logs from it and also they have a 420 that they have tested with and had no problems. I don't know what wireless card they used though will have to find out.

Ben

[plexer]

I've just discovered that these laptops have an integrated broadcom 4311 BG card in them so no chance of sending a card to HP support.

They then suggested I send a whole laptop and I've suggested they get HP to provide them with one as it's a general issue and not with this specific laptop itself.

Ben

[ajbritton]

I feel your pain, Ben. WLAN is a royal PITA at the best of times. The last thing you need is to be stuck between two vendors. Best of luck with it, and do keep updating the post.

[plexer]

Thats the main issue you see I'm not stuck between 2 vendors as it's an HP laptops with an HP WAP that doesn't work it's just HP

I have tried the laptop with the buffalo and it works lovely.

Ben

[ajbritton]

Doh! Stoopid me! I think I just saw a WLAN problem and it got my back up!