hostapd, b43, nl80211 driver, WPA: report, and two questions

[Francis Galiegue]

Hello,

>
>
>  > * if the b43 network interface is within a bridge (the bridge's MAC
>  > address is _not_ the one of the b43 FWIW), unencrypted works, however
>  > WPA does not; is this a hostapd only problem, or does the kernel need
>  > some more support for this? Would it be helpful that I provide some
>  > logs (I have a problem with the 25k message limit though, since logs
>  > are HUGE with hostapd in debug mode)?
>
>  Did you configure both the WLAN ifname (interface=...) and bridge ifname
>  (bridge=...) in hostapd.conf? hostapd needs to know the bridge interface
>  name in order to be able to send and receive EAPOL frames properly. Feel
>  free to email a debug log file directly to me (j at w1.fi) if needed due to
>  message length limits on the mailing list.
>

The comments in hostapd.conf say that this bridge parameter is only
valid for the ath5k and hostap drivers... Misleading? (I shamelessly
admit that I didn't plunge into the code yet.)

I'll try that and report.

>
>  > * with WPA PSK working, I get this loop in hostapd's stdout:
>  >
>  > ----
>  > wlan0: STA 00:15:00:35:12:e0 IEEE 802.11: disassociated
>  > wlan0: STA 00:15:00:35:12:e0 IEEE 802.11: authenticated
>  > # accounting session number increases by 1 every iteration
>  > wlan0: STA 00:15:00:35:12:e0 IEEE 802.11: associated (aid 1,
>  > accounting session 481A24F5-0000003C)
>  > wlan0: STA 00:15:00:35:12:e0 WPA: pairwise key handshake completed (WPA)
>  > wlan0: STA 00:15:00:35:12:e0 WPA: group key handshake completed (WPA)
>  > ----
>  >
>  > is this expected?
>
>  If that happens constantly, no, I would not expect it. I do not know
>  what is triggered the disconnection based on this log excerpt, though.
>  Anyway, if you have not configured hostapd to rekey frequently, the
>  connection should remain up without any additional associations at this
>  point.
>

Well, I've left the default configuration apart from the driver and
WPA settings. I'll have a closer look.

The AP has been working fine for several days apart from these two
small problems.

Have fun!
-- 
Francis Galiegue, fgaliegue at gmail.com
"It seems obvious [...] that at least some 'business intelligence'
tools invest so much intelligence on the business side that they have
nothing left for generating SQL queries" (Stéphane Faroult, in "The
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