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

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Wed, 2006-06-21 at 17:55 -0400, Peter Williams wrote:
> 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.

If drivers were better, and we could trust their strength information
(which we can't), we'd likely even remove APs from the scan list if
their strength was < 15% or something like that.  Anything below that
and you're pretty much screwed.

Dan