wpa_supplicant ad-hoc settings

Jouni Malinen j at w1.fi
Thu Nov 18 08:35:52 EST 2010


On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 02:13:29PM +0100, Per-Henrik Lundblom wrote:
> So, in my eyes the ad-hoc support in wpa_supplicant is, and has always 
> been, broken. Am I missing something?

Yes.. It was originally designed to only work in ap_scan=2 mode i.e.,
when wpa_supplicant does not request scanning. In other words, you would
configure just one network and set ap_scan=2. The scanning part in
ap_scan=1 is only for BSS networks.

> wpa_supplicant does a complete scan and matches the result with the 
> network configuration. If match is found, wpa_supplicant then configures 
> SSID, BSSID, channel and operation mode so that the WLAN driver joins 
> the ad-hoc network. If no match is found, it configures SSID, channel 
> (from the frequency configuration directive) and operation mode so that 
> the WLAN driver can create it's own ad-hoc network.

It would be possible to extend the ap_scan=1 case to handle discovered
IBSS, i.e., select to use the IBSS network block in such a case.
However, if there are multiple enabled network blocks, it is unclear
what should be done if one or more of them are IBSS networks and there
are no matching scan results. Only the case of having a single enabled
network block would be clear in such a case.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA


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