WPA Password With Accents Won't Work

I’ve just found out this isn’t OpenSuse exclusive, but I noticed it when setting up OpenSuse 11.4 on a laptop.

The WPA password in question has an accented vowel (ã) which is making both my Linux laptops (a KDE and a Gnome one) fail to connect. My wife’s Win7 laptop has no problem with it. If I change the letter from *ã *to a, then they connect.

Is there a way to configure the Networkmanagers so that they accept these special characters?

Thanks.

Edited to add: the pass phrase also has spaces and “!?” chars, but these don’t give any problem. Only the accented vowels do.

One possibility is that your wife’s Win7 laptop isn’t using utf-8. Check that first.

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Unless I’m reading this incorrectly using that character is not valid.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Protected_Access

Out of curiosity, when you wrote that you changed to ‘a’ (from the
character with the accent) did you change that on your WAP or just on
the client/OpenSUSE side? If the latter then that definitely shows that
this character is not valid. If you changed it on the WAP as well as
the laptop, well, not sure. Perhaps the WAP and windows aren’t sticking
as closely to the standard as they could.

“Each wireless network device encrypts the network traffic using a 256
bit key. This key may be entered either as a string of 64 hexadecimal
digits, or as a passphrase of 8 to 63 printable ASCII characters.”

I’m open to other interpretations of the standard…

Good luck.


Want to yell at me in person?
Come to BrainShare 2011 in October: http://tinyurl.com/brainshare2011
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I didn’t know about the “63 printable ASCII characters”. The tilde sign is a valid ASCII character, though. Tough luck.

The ã to a change was done in the router (It’s an Asus WL500g, by the way), and it allowed me to use that password. I guess neither the router or Win7 play by the standards, although in this case, being from somewhere where accented characters abound, I wish the standards were different.

On 2011-09-15 22:06, leandroribeiro wrote:
>
> I didn’t know about the “63 printable ASCII characters”. The tilde sign
> is a valid ASCII character, though. Tough luck.

No, accentuated chars are not ascii… they are above char(127).

Check “man ascii”:

ASCII is the American Standard Code for Information
Interchange. It is a 7-bit code. Many 8-bit codes (such as ISO
8859-1, the Linux default character set) contain ASCII as their
lower half. The international counterpart of ASCII
is known as ISO 646.

> The -ã- to -a- change was done in the router (It’s an Asus WL500g, by
> the way), and it allowed me to use that password. I guess neither the
> router or Win7 play by the standards, although in this case, being from
> somewhere where accented characters abound, I wish the standards were
> different.

Impossible, unless you also specify which charset locale to use universally.


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)