Re: More issues with NM-0.6 and non-broadcast SSID

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Thu, 2008-02-14 at 12:36 -0500, Derek Atkins wrote:
> My chronic problem with non-broadcast SSID has hit upon
> an interesting workaround.  I'm using Fedora 7 with the
> following package versions:
> 
> NetworkManager-0.6.5-7.fc7
> kernel-2.6.23.9-45.fc7
> wpa_supplicant-0.5.7-4.fc7
> 
> I'm using the iwl3945 driver in the kernel.  When I try to
> connect to my office network (non-broadcast, open 802.11g)
> it rarely connects.  If I shut down NM, reset the driver,
> and just let it come up on it's own it connects fine.
> 
> But yesterday I figured out that if I tell the driver to
> connect to any bssid then it will work great, and connects
> right away.  In other words, as soon as I tell NM to try to
> connect (or as soon as it tries to connect all on its own!)
> I need to type the following command:
> 
>   iwconfig eth1 essid <essid> ap 00:00:00:00:00:00
> 
> And then it connects right away!!  Yesterday it took me about
> 30 minutes of trial and error to get NM to accept the connection,
> but today... Voom.  I typed this command when NM was trying
> to connect and voila, it connected!

This likely causes the driver to emit probe-requests when trying to
connect to the AP, hence it's able to find the AP becuase the hidden AP
responds to the probe request with its SSID.

> So it looks like the NM/wpa_supplicant bssid assignment isn't very
> happy here.  I'm glad I found a workaround, but is there anything we
> can do to make it so I don't have to do this manually?

Update your kernel to the latest & greatest F7 update (which includes
the scan capability patch) and then wait for 0.6.6 to get pushed to
F7-updates, which should automatically handle the hidden BSSID thing by
having the supplicant probe-scan the AP [1].  Not all of the bits will
fall in place until early March though :(

Dan

[1] basically, the scan capability patch allows NM to correctly choose
AP_SCAN=1/scan_ssid=1 or AP_SCAN=2 in the supplicant