Re: NM does not work with iwl4965 device

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Wed, 2007-08-08 at 20:14 -0500, Peter Van Lone wrote:
> On 8/8/07, Thomas M Steenholdt <tmus tmus dk> wrote:
> 
> > wpa_supplicant only - ap_scan=1:
> >
> > The hidden network is found during the scanning, but is never identified
> > as my network, since wpa_supplicant expects a certain SSID and the
> > hidden net shows an SSID of "" (SSID mismatch).  The device SSID is
> > never set.
> > (as soon as I set the device SSID with iwconfig in this mode,
> > wpa_supplicant makes the association happen)
> 
> perhaps I am just being dull ... but is not the above exactly what
> should happen? From the perspective of NM, if an SSID is hidden, a
> user would need to supply it by choosing "connect to other wireless
> network". Once the user types in the SSID, NM *should* pass that to
> wpa_supplicant, and then association should occur.

Correct; that's exactly what AP_SCAN=2 is supposed to do.  NM gives it
everything it needs, and wpa_supplicant is supposed to blindly send all
those options to the driver, which then has the information it needs to
associate.

> Or, am I missing something?
> 
> In my case ... since "connect to other wireless network" does not
> work, it appears that one of two things must be going wrong:
> 
> 1)NM is not properly handing the SSID to wpa_supplicant (is failing to
> do what iwconfig does when you use it to set SSID), or
> 2)wpa_supplicant is not running in ap_scan=1 mode
> 
> So ... either the hand-off is broken or the mode is wrong. (and the
> mode appears to be unsettable from the NM gui, which is another issue
> to my mind --- linux is about choice, right?) :-)

Except you shouldn't _have_ to choose between AP_SCAN=1 and AP_SCAN=2
anywhere, because if anything, this discussion has demonstrated that no
reasonable person could possibly understand which option to pick :)

I assert that the AP_SCAN config option for wpa_supplicant is just plain
dumb.

> Anyway ... we don't need wpa_supplicant to "find" the hidden SSID, do
> we? We just need it to succeed connecting, when we TELL it the SSID.

Right.  However, wpa_supplicant still needs to know some other
information about the network.  Some of this gets fixed with NM 0.7
where wpa_supplicant is run all the time, and all scan requests go
through wpa_supplicant, not NM.  So if wpa_supplicant doesn't know about
the network (which it definitely should!) then NM wouldn't know about it
either.

Dan

> Peter
> 
> 
> ps -- sorry if I am being obtuse, perhaps my sig line below applies? :-)
> 
> 
>