Incompatibility hostapd - windows

Jouni Malinen jkmaline at cc.hut.fi
Mon Feb 27 22:32:27 EST 2006


On Mon, Feb 27, 2006 at 12:51:31PM +0100, jers at inwind.it wrote:

> I carried out a system with a linux AP and Windows clients. The used security policy is WPA-PSK. In order to do that I have installed hostapd (working with madwifi) on the AP and the wpa_supplicant for windows on clients, in accordance with the documentation provided in hostap site. No problems... the system works very well.

> But... WHY I need to install wpa_supplicant for Windows? Why the AP with hostapd and windows clients without wpa_supplicant cannot get the connection? I have also used commercial APs and I have configured the same clients in WPA-PSK mode with the normal procedures provided by Windows/card drivers (so without wpa_supplicant). I have not found any problem.

You should not need to use wpa_supplicant on Windows because of this.

> I know that WPA is standardized, so I cannot suppose that hostapd or Windows systems use different rules, or not? What is the reason of this incompatibility between hostapd and Windows?

I'm not aware of any interoperability issues, i.e., this works fine in
my tests. Could you please provide more details of the configuration
(including hostapd.conf and madwifi driver version) and send a debug log
from hostapd? If this is not enough, it would also be useful to get
debug information from the client side. Which supplicant are you using
there? Microsoft?

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA



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