dhclient and wpa_supplicant
Stijn Hoop
stijn at win.tue.nl
Sun Jul 31 21:45:42 GMT 2005
On Sun, Jul 31, 2005 at 11:31:58AM -0700, Sam Leffler wrote:
> Stijn Hoop wrote:
> > On Fri, Jul 29, 2005 at 06:08:53PM -0700, Sam Leffler wrote:
> > > I just ran tests with wpa_supplicant and found that it does appear to
> > > handle open ap's properly.
> >
> > I cannot get this to work, using 2 different MiniPCI cards and
> > a Linksys WRT54G, on a 7-CURRENT from yesterday.
> >
> > The cards:
> >
> > - an Intel Pro Wireless 2200B/G (model WM3A2200BG, Dell branded) using iwi
> > - a Dell Truemobile 1300 WLAN (bcm4306) using ndis
> >
> > For details, log files, etc, see
> >
> > http://sandcat.nl/~stijn/freebsd/20050731-wlan/
>
> Sigh, well for iwi you do say:
>
> "Maybe the problem is not with wpa_supplicant though; I cannot get
> if_iwi to associate by using ifconfig manually either."
>
> Er, yeah, if you cannot associate w/o wpa_supplicant I'm not sure why
> you'd think it'd be more capable? (unless you're using wpa)
Wasn't sure myself either; but maybe wpa_supplicant set some modes
differently then 'plain regular' ifconfig. At least now I know I have
to get it working first, so I'll try that in the future.
> The log shows:
>
> Jul 31 11:04:17 pounce kernel: iwi0: macaddr bssid
> chan rssi rate flag wep essid
> Jul 31 11:04:17 pounce kernel: - 00:50:fc:d6:85:82 00:50:fc:d6:85:82
> 11 38 11M ess no "default"!
>
> which means you found one ap w/ an ssid of "default" and it was rejected
> because you configured the device for a different ssid. However I see
> probe resp frames from LZ111 in your log but it's never added to the
> scan list for some reason. Seems like someone with iwi devices should
> investigate.
OK, so this confirms a bug in if_iwi. I'll send a PR.
> The ndis driver shows nothing in the log that indicates it hooks up
> properly to the net80211 layer so wpa_supplicant is unlikely to work
> with it. Unfortunately there are many drivers that bypass the net80211
> layer causing applications written to the common api to not work.
:-(
> OTOH your dhclient.conf file is so trivial that I'm not surprised it works;
> you could just as well have used:
>
> ifconfig_ndis0="ssid LZ111 DHCP"
Didn't know that either, good idea. One less config file to edit.
> The issue with dhclient using dhclient.conf to set wireless parameters
> is that it does so, then sends it's DHCP protocol msg, then waits a
> fixed amount of time for a response from a DHCP server. This is prone
> to fail as different configurations take different amounts of time to
> complete the scan+associate work. Also dhclient (now) processes link
> state and assoc/reassoc/disassoc msgs which confuses this approach. I
> did some changes to have it ignore these messages while setting the
> media parameters but it was complicated and still routinely failed
> because the timeouts were too small. In the end I concluded that it
> wasn't worth supporting this mechanism any more; that wpa_supplicant is
> the better approach since it will scan ONCE and then select the
> appropriate network (while dhclient had to scan once for each possible
> network). In general I have advocated that dhclient do less; in this
> case I want dhclient to let someone else setup the wireless networking
> parameters and have it do just the dhcp protocol. The fact that
> dhclient messes with media parameters for an interface is more a
> byproduct of configuring wired networks (and not having better tools to
> configure wireless networks).
OK, noted. So 'all it takes' is someone converting ndis to use all of the
802.11 api? (no idea how large a task this is).
> wpa_supplicant depends on a couple features in the net80211 layer to
> work properly: manual roaming (forcing the driver to not automtically do
> things like associate after scanning so it can instead decide which ap
> to use), scan (scan for ap's and report results), and associate to a
> particular ap (as identified in the scan results). Past that it uses
> the common ioctl's defined to set keys and other parameters that you
> normally get to via ifconfig. For wpa and 802.1x is needs some more
> stuff. Drivers that bypass the net80211 layer for some or all of this
> stuff may not work correctly and should be fixed.
Is there a list of these drivers? How about ral/ural? I read about
other problems with those. About the only useful wireless option then
is an Atheros card?
Thanks for the detailed reply, some of this stuff makes more sense now.
--Stijn
--
I really hate this damned machine
I wish that they would sell it.
It never does quite what I want
But only what I tell it.
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