Re: iwlwifi3945 and WPA-EAP LEAP

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 10:57 -0500, Ryan Novosielski wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Has anyone gotten the combination of iwlwifi3945 working for LEAP on WPA
> Enterprise? My ipw3945 does work in this setup, however the other one
> does not. The only other negative to iwlwifi is that it does not operate
> my LED on my Dell. However, this driver solves a nasty crash on this HW.
> 
> Anyone have any ideas? I haven't really tried it by hand with
> wpa_supplicant, but I wanted to see if anyone had any experience first.

(Ryan said the network is hiding the SSID)

Ok; this is a driver/kernel bug such that there is not enough
information for NetworkManager to be able to tell the driver how to find
your hidden SSID.  ipw3945 handles this, but the new iwl3945 does not.
I've submitted a patch for 2.6.25 that is easily backported to earlier
kernels that will allow NetworkManager to find out the necessary
information (ie, whether or not the driver supports SSID-specific
scans), and I'll be modifying NetworkManager use this information to fix
hidden SSID support.

The core issue is that some drivers need ap_scan=1+scan_ssid=1 when
driven by wpa_supplicant, and others need ap_scan=2 [1].  There is no
way to determine which you need except strcmp()-ing the driver name,
which is just plain evil.  The kernel patch will allow NM to handle this
situation in the correct manner.

Dan

[1] my assertion is that all drivers must support ap_scan=2, but
mac80211-based drivers do not currently handle this well.  So in reality
it's purely a kernel/driver bug, but something that NM will have to work
around.