Re: networkmanager fails to associate (ipw3945)

[Volker Braun <volker braun physik hu-berlin de>]

On Sat, 10 Feb 2007 17:17:21 -0500, Dan Williams wrote:
> This is a really complicated issue.  It depends on what disconnect means
> during the association attempt.  During 802.1x handshakes, it's
> certainly possible that we have associated and authed to the access
> point, but if our credentials are wrong, the RADIUS server may have
> kicked us off, and wpa_supplicant returns a DISCONNECT event.

With wpa-psk, wpa_supplicant tells you (*)

"WPA: 4-Way Handshake failed - pre-shared key may be incorrect"

before disconnecting, that seems to be a better diagnostic. I don't
know about WPA enterprise. I know that WEP sucks in that regard as well :-)

My point was that if we get an unspecific CTRL-EVENT-DISCONNECTED we
shouldn't give up, but try again until the full timeout or until 
we get an error that makes it clear that we will not be able to
authenticate. Right now the disconnect shortens the whole 20sec timeout.

Maybe NetworkManager could continue to try to associate in the
background after the reasonable (like 20sec) timeout passed. That is,
after 20 sec show again the password dialog but continue quietly until the
user clicks OK/Cancel. If association succeeds after the timeout, just
close the password dialog.

Volker

(*) Though when I tried right now I couldn't associate with the correct
psk on FC6+ipw2200+wpa_supplicant -Dwext, while NetworkManager works fine.