WPA Access Point

[Kevin Oberman]

> From: Neal Nelson <nealie at kobudo.homeunix.net>
> Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2005 18:36:12 +0100
> Sender: owner-freebsd-stable at freebsd.org
> 
> On 14 Dec 2005, at 20:00, Sam Leffler wrote:
> 
> > Neal Nelson wrote:
> >> Has anyone got FreeBSD 6.0 to work as a wireless access point using 
> >> WPA?
> >> I'm running a Prism 2.5 based wireless card and have been using it as 
> >> an access point for years. It stills works OK but I installed the 
> >> hostapd port in order to add WPA authentication. Unfortunately this 
> >> doesn't seem to work as it complains when I run it as follows:
> >> bsd_configure_wpa: group key cipher=AES-CCM (3)
> >> ioctl[SIOCS80211]: Invalid argument
> >> I'm not sure whether hostapd is configured right as there seems to be 
> >> no documentation for it.
> >> Can anyone shed some light on this or am I barking up the wrong tree 
> >> as far as WPA is concerned?
> >
> > The above error is likely because you don't have wlan_ccmp 
> > loaded/configured.  However
> >
> > ifconfig wi0 list caps
> >
> > should indicate the driver lacks support for WPA1/WPA2.  Guess it 
> > would be good for hostpad to check that.
> >
> > 	Sam
> 
> You are quite right on both counts. I built a new kernel with some 
> extra wlan_ options and hostapd runs without complaint now. Of course 
> it still doesn't work as my wi interface doesn't have the WPA 
> capability.
> 
> On the plus side I've finally managed to configure my system to talk to 
> my Mac with WEP. OK it's not ideal but it's a start and I was unable to 
> get them to talk when I tried it first some time ago.
> 
> Do you have any idea whether WPA will be added to the wi driver or 
> should I look for another interface card if I want to use this?

To the best of my knowledge there is no firmware for the Prism2.5 that
supports WPA and, without that, I don't think that the driver is going
to help.

I would love to see if_wi updated to better work with the FreeBSD wlan
architecture, but I know that I don't have the time to do it and I would not
hold my breath as this chip is getting very long of tooth and probably
has not shipped in new hardware for at least two years. I still use it
because my laptop has one built-in. I'm due for a new laptop in about a
year and I imagine that I will never deal with anything using if_wi
after that.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634