Re: WPA rt2500 wpa_supplicant

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Fri, 2006-02-03 at 12:59 +0000, Pete O'Grady wrote:
> I have a wireless card based upon the rt2500 chipset. It does not require wpa_supplicant for WPA access to networks as it is an open source driver and wpa is built into the card. I read that Network-Manager's WPA implementation will use wpa_supplicant. Will this cause an issue? Would I still be able to use this card with NetworkManager for WPA access?

All WPA connections require the use wpa_supplicant for two reasons:

1) You need wpa_supplicant for WPA2 and 802.1x anyway, to do all the
EAP/PEAP/certificate state machine stuff

2) wpa_supplicant conveniently serves as the _one_ place that does all
the WPA related ops.  While I know that individual drivers have their
own little utilities to control things like WPA/etc, drivers need to
converge on a single API (ie, WEXT or its successor).  Otherwise, you
write a different backend for every freakin' driver out there, and
that's complete insanity :)

So yes, you'll need wpa_supplicant to do WPA with your card.

Dan