Re: Flaky association with ipw2200 and Linksys WRT54G

[Robert Hancock <hancockr shaw ca>]

Dan Williams wrote:
> In the log below, where does it start?  I notice that wpa_supplicant
> thinks the state is DISCONNECTED, is that because you're already hitting
> the up/down/up/down problem?
>
> If NM or wpa_supplicant is requesting the driver perform a scan, then
> the driver should not be reporting disassociation (ie, AP = 00:00:...)
> events during the scan.  That's a driver bug.  However, until drivers
> get fixed, we may have to patch wpa_supplicant to ignore disassociation
> events during the scan.
>
> You can test all this by setting up the card with iwconfig alone,
> issuing an "iwlist eth1 scan" command, and watching the output of
> 'iwevent' to see if the disassociation event occurs.  If the ipw2200
> driver does send then, then I think it's doing the wrong thing here.

I've retested this using NetworkManager 0.6.2 and ipw2200 1.1.2 to see 
if it improved things. It doesn't, in fact it's worse, the setup is 
completely nonfunctional unless you disable scan completion events - the 
only place I found that documented is here:

http://www.ces.clemson.edu/linux/fc2-ipw2200.shtml

"Version 1.1.2 of ipw2200 implements a scan completion event which 
NetworkManager currently does not handle. This can cause NetworkManager 
to fail to make a wireless connection. Comment out the following lines 
from ipw2200.c and rebuild."

Without this change it seems like something (I assume the supplicant) 
goes nuts (seemingly in a loop) when trying to connect. I can supply the 
logs if they're useful (it's rather big).

With this change I'm seeing the same behavior as I did before. Sometimes 
it works, sometimes the connection times out, sometimes it goes into an 
infinite loop of connecting, then (apparently) yanking the keys out, 
reconnecting, etc. Looking at iwevent when the loop is going on, I 
sometimes see that it appears to have associated with the AP 
momentarily, then for whatever reason it loses the association again.

I did verify that when requesting a manual scan with iwlist eth1 scan, 
no events (disconnection, etc.) seem to be reported in iwevent (this is 
with the scan completion events commented out in the driver).

I wonder if there's something unusual in my setup, or is everyone with 
ipw2200, Linksys AP and WPA experiencing the same flakiness?