[hostap driver] not authenticating when used w/ wpa-supplicant / network-manager

Tony Espy espy at pepper.com
Wed Aug 15 15:01:56 EDT 2007


Dan Williams wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-08-14 at 15:59 -0600, Andrew Jorgensen wrote:
>> On 8/14/07, Andrew Jorgensen <andrew.jorgensen at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Also, in another thread you advised the user to use the wext driver
>>> against hostap_*.  Is that the preferred driver for current versions
>>> of hostap_*?  There's a patch in the Ubuntu network-manager that sets
>>> the wpa-supplicant driver to hostap if the device driver is hostap_*.
>>> They can try taking that out if it should work better.
>> Using the wext driver doesn't appear to change anything.  Anything
>> else I can do to debug this?
>>
>> Also, I've read reports elsewhere that wpa-supplicant has worked with
>> the hostap driver and the 1.7.1 firmware.  Even more reports that it
>> works with 1.5.6 firmware, which I have also tried.

The original Pepper Pad 2 used a modified versions of the hostap driver 
and wpa_supplicant ( both v0.4.7 ).  As long as the card's STA firmware 
was >= 1.7.1, things worked just fine with WPA/WPA2 access points.

I'm pretty sure WPA support was added in 1.7.1 of the STA fw, not 1.5.6, 
however I could be wrong.  The WiFi cards we received from Gemtek for 
the original Pepper Pads were shipped with STA fw 1.4.9 which I know for 
a fact didn't support WPA, so we had to upgrade them on-the-fly to 1.8.X.

Also, I tried an experiment on my PP2 starting wpa_supplicant with 
-Dhostap vs. -Dwext and this made no difference in behavior with respect 
to WPA/WPA2 access points.

Please note however that the Pepper Pads are *not* running 
NetworkManager.  I think there may be a bug in NetworkManager with 
respect to the hostap driver and WPA/WPA2.  As I understand it, 
NetworkManager talks to the drivers directly to handle scanning versus 
the Pepper software which lets wpa_supplicant handle scanning.

I have a laptop running the latest version of Ubuntu Gutsy which has a 
Prism card...I just upgraded the STA firmware to 1.8.4 and now NM 
doesn't list our Airport Extreme ( configured as WPA2 ) in it's scan 
results.  Before I upgraded the STA fw, the Airport showed up 
incorrectly as a WEP access point.

I haven't had a chance to dig any further.

Ciao,
/tony
Pepper Computer



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