WPI (Intel wireless 3945ABG) strange behaviour

[Adrian Chadd]

Yeah, that's the same problem at iwn - the firmware rejects any frames
being transmitted to 5ghz passive channels until a beacon is received.

It's likely some buffering in net80211 and/or the driver(s) is required.

It's not breaking regulatory - the NIC already scanned the channel and
heard a beacon. But then the firmware is reset to associate to the
channel (rather than scan) and it "loses" knowledge that the channel
is fine to transmit on. So net80211 associating with one frame which
is instantly rejected by the firmware. Something needs to buffer that
and other frames until the firmware sees a beacon - then if it retries
the frame(s), it'll successfully be transmitted.

I've known about the problem for a while. I've just been too busy /
distracted to sit down and fix it. It's not a conceptually difficult
thing to fix - someone just has to do it. :P


-a



On 23 August 2014 13:59, Chris Van Steenlandt
<chris.vansteenlandt at telenet.be> wrote:
> Adrian,
>
> - ifconfig step (creation of pseudo device) completed successfully
> - wpa_supplicant gives the following type of output (I can't paste it here,
> but I'll describe the structure of the output) :
>
> 1st message : Initialization successfull
>
> Then the following blocks of messages (they alternate or repeat)
> Block 1 :
>
> Trying to associate with <mac address> (SSID='myssid' freq=5180 Mhz)
> wlan0 : Authentication with <mac address> timed out.
> wlan0 : CTRL_EVENT_DISCONNECTED bssid =<mac address> reason=3
> locally_generated=1
> ioctl[SIOCS80211, op=20, val=0, arg_len=7] : Can't assign requested adress
>
> Block 2 :
> Trying to associate with <mac address> (SSID='myssid' freq=2412 Mhz)
> wlan0 : Associated with <mac address>
> wlan0 : WPA: Key negotiation completed with <mac address>  [PTK=CMP
> GTK=TKIP]
> wlan0 : CTRL_EVENT_CONNECTED - Connection to <mac address> completed [id=0
> id_str=]
>
>
> Block 2 is sometines followed by :
> wlan0 : CTRL_EVENT_DISCONNECTED bssid =<mac address> reason=0
> and then followed by block 1
>
> For as far as I understand, the driver switches between the 2.4 GHz and 5
> Ghz band of my wireless network. Indeed my wifi router is configured to
> support both bands but apparently my wifi driver can only handle the 2.4Ghz
> one.
>
>
> On 23-08-14 22:19, Adrian Chadd wrote:
>
> Ok.
>
> Just try it manually -
>
> * comment out stuff from /etc/rc.conf and reboot
> * ifconfig wlan0 create wlandev wpi0 -bgscan
> * wpa_supplicant -i wlan0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf &
> * ifconfig wlan0 list scan - you haven't pasted that here, so we have
> no idea what APs it is seeing
>
> then see.
>
> If you compiled in IEEE80211_DEBUG in your kernel config, then
> 'wlandebug +scan' and see what is spat out to the kernel config.
>
>