Setting WEP keys in Kamikaze

I finally had a pressing need to OpenWRT-ize a Linksys WRT54GS v4 I bought over a year ago. The idea is to use the unit for field testing, so I want to be able to constantly change settings without rebooting or running complex scripts. Basically I want to SSH into the WRT and change settings at will as easily as possible.

The version of OpenWRT that I flashed was Kamikaze 7.09 and it has been working beautifully. Very fast boot times, organized filesystem and configuration structure, and plenty of RAM and Flash to spare. The radio in this box is a Broadcom, which I'm not very used to. I have a BCM4318 in my budget Acer Aspire 3002 laptop, and it works quite well, but I basically use it for connecting to a single access point using WPA encryption.

On the WRT box (which I fondly hostnamed 'wart') I wanted to try out WEP (yes, the old, insecure, useless WEP), mostly because a lot of access points in my area use it. Typically one could just use something like iwconfig wl0 enc <WEP key> to accomplish that. Sadly this doesn't work, although no error message is returned. Simply nothing happens, and the status of the interface ends up like:

wl0       IEEE 802.11-DS  ESSID:"MUSIK"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.462 GHz  Access Point: 00:02:2D:0D:1B:39   
          Tx-Power:19 dBm   
          RTS thr:2347 B   Fragment thr:2346 B   
          Encryption key:<too big>
          Link Signal level:-42 dBm  Noise level:-96 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:516  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

Notice the Encryption key:<too big> line. It seems that the wireless tools don't play too well with the Broadcom's "advanced" settings. Even after I got this to work I still got the same output from iwconfig.

After some searching I found out that the utility that controls most of the internals of the Broadcom hardware is called wlc. Sure enough it was a "wepkey" option that should do the trick. The syntax seemed to be wlc wepkey <WEP key>, only that always returned:

Command 'set wepkey' failed: -1

I couldn't find a docs for wlc by searching online, so I fetched the full Kamikaze source tree to check its source code (hail to Open Source!). It turns out that the syntax expects you to inform the key slot to store to (1 through 4), and to use "=" to assign the "PRIMARY KEY", which is the slot that will be actually used. Thus, the command that worked for me was wlc wepkey =1,<WEP key>. Notice that I'm using an hex WEP key. If you use an ASCII WEP key, prefix it with "s:".

And that did it for me. Now with a simple call to wlc I can change WEP keys on the fly and get instant results.