Re: Connection sharing and security

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Mon, 2009-06-29 at 11:54 -0700, Bill Moseley wrote:
> Is there something special I need to do to support wireless security
> when sharing my network connection on my laptpop?
> 
> On my ubuntu Thinkpad T61 running ath9k driver I can "Create New
> Wireless Network..." without any security
> and my iPhone will connect to the laptop's wireless.
> 
> If I try and enable security (WEP or WPA) then the iPhone seems to
> connect (asks for a password and once entered displays a check
> next to the connection, but never gets an IP address assigned.  (It
> also still shows the "3G" icon instead of the wireless icon.

Probably that's DHCP failing due to a wrong key.  There are two
possibilities here:

1) WEP: failing because the iPhone isn't getting the right WEP key.  Are
you entering it in hex form?  I doubt the iPhone will be using the
standard WEP-104 passphrase hashing based on MD5, since Apple invented
their own mechanism called a "WEP Password" before the MD5 de-facto
standard was around.  So, try creating the network with a hex key
instead, and using that on the iPhone.

2) WPA: the driver on your laptop may not fully support WPA-PSK adhoc
mode.  In fact, we don't expect that to work for mac80211-based drivers
at this time, but since the drivers advertise support for it, it's a bug
that needs to be fixed in the drivers.  Some fullmac drivers can do this
just fine, so there are some that work and some that don't.

3) You may need updates to wpa_supplicant; there is one patch that makes
the supplicant correctly switch between adhoc and managed mode when
using mac80211 drivers that's necessary.  That should be present in
recent releases of wpa_supplicant 0.6.x and later.

Any one of these issues could be the problem.  Can you grab the output
of 'iwconfig' when the adhoc network is active?  That will start
narrowing down the issue.

Dan

> I tried to debug with Wireshark and all I see are Logic-Link Control
> packets from the iPhone to the laptop.  It's a bit curious, but
> Wireshark is showing "Netgear_73:d6:8c" as the destination.  I wonder
> if that's my Netgear AP at home where it last connected.
> My MAC on my laptop's wireless is 00:19:7e:57:65:5d.
> 
> -- 
> Bill Moseley
> moseley hank org
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