Re: Association timeout with madwifi

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Thu, 2006-06-29 at 12:05 -0400, Tom Diehl wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Jun 2006, Simon Geard wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 2006-06-28 at 23:03 -0400, Tom Diehl wrote:
> >> I also added the following to /etc/sysconfig/wpa_supplicant:
> >> INTERFACES="-iath0"
> >> DRIVERS="-Dmadwifi"
> >>
> >> I do not recall if that was really necessary but I looked in my working
> >> config and it is in there.
> >
> > Does that work if you use -Dwext instead? I was unable to use NM for
> > ages due to madwifi's lack of support for the latest extensions, and had
> > to use wpa_supplicant manually with -Dmadwifi.
> >
> > As of a couple of months ago though, they fixed the drivers enough that
> > -Dwext worked with them, and thus NM started working.
> 
> No.
> 
> I even upgraded to madwifi-0.1659.20060629-6.

This version of the driver appears to support WEXT + WPA if the
wpa_supplicant driver 'wext' is used.

> One more question, is it possible I am missing some other package to make
> this work? I cannot find any documentation that talks about any of the
> config files. Does that mean it is supposed to "just work" or am I missing
> something?

There are no config files when using NM; it should just work.  (unless
you want static IP of course, that's a different story)

> Is wpa_supplicant suposed to start boot or is nm supposed to handle it?
> I seem to remember seeing something go by that said not to start it at boot
> because nm was supposed to take care of it.

NM spawns a copy of wpa_supplicant right now.  In the future (for NM
0.7) I'm adding a dbus interface for wpa_supplicant, at which point NM
will require that a dbus-enabled wpa_supplicant be running before you
make a connection, ie running as a system daemon at boot time.

> If nm is supposed to take care of it does it parse
> /etc/sysconfig/wpa_supplicant?

No, it does not parse that configuration file.  The configuration
information is entered into the dialogs that the nm-applet presents when
you first try to connect to an access point.

> If nm does not parse /etc/sysconfig/wpa_suplicant, where am I supposed to
> put the -Dwext?

Use of the 'wext' wpa_supplicant driver is hardcoded into
NetworkManager.  It may be that your distribution has added a check for
the 'madwifi' drivers, and patched NM to use -Dmadwifi instead since
madwifi-ng has only worked with the 'wext' driver for a few months.  If
that's the case, you'll need to take that patch out of the NM sources
and rebuild NM.  All wireless drivers should be supporting Linux
Wireless Extensions (WEXT), and if they don't, they should be fixed
upstream to do so.

Dan