Re: Early timeouts connecting to unencrypted network with ndiswrapper on FC5

[Peter Williams <peter newton cx>]

On Wed, 2006-06-21 at 10:23 -0400, Dan Williams wrote:
> Sounds an awful lot like the ndiswrapper driver is broken in some way;
> if you can't connect with (a) the command line tools from wireless-tools
> and (b) you can't connect with wpa_supplicant, then NM's not going to
> work.
> 
> First, I'd try to figure out the scan problem; from a terminal, do you
> get scan results from "/sbin/iwlist <eth whatever> scan" consistently?
> I also hear that ndiswrapper has better WEXT support now too.  Does
> wpa_supplicant not work with the -Dwext option at all?

Yeah, only later did I notice a line in my /var/log/messages from
wpa_supplicant saying that -Dndiswrapper has been deprecated in favor of
-Dwext.

It turns out that sometimes I can associate and get my connection
working. So the problem becomes one that I've had with before, on
different hardware: with some networks, association intermittently times
out in Stage 2 of the connection process.

After doing some digging, I'm pretty sure that the issue in such
situations is that you can (barely) receive packets from the base
station, but that it can't receive packets from the weaker antenna on
your wifi card. In the general Stage 2 timeout case, NM doesn't have
much information to go on, but some kind of notification saying what the
likely problem is would be very helpful, IMHO.

Peter

-- 
Peter Williams / peter newton cx