Re: change wpa-psk authentication timeout

[Howard Chu <hyc symas com>]

> Date: Mon, 09 Nov 2009 23:15:04 -0800
> From: Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>

> On Fri, 2009-11-06 at 18:59 +0100, Fabio Airoldi wrote:
>> > I have an authentication timeout when connecting to my wireless network.
>> > However if I move closer to the AP I can connect without problems, and
>> > even if I go back to my desk the connection doesn't drop.
>> > 
>> > I am using networkmanager v 0.7.1 on fedora 11 (kernel 2.6.30.9). I
>> > tried setting iwlagn parameters (disable_hw_scan, sw_crypto ... almost
>> > every combination possible) but nothing changed.
>> > 
>> > Is it possible to increase the authentication timeout? Maybe this is a
>> > dumb question but I wasn't able to find any documentation about
>> > timeouts.

> The full WPA connection timeout for NM is about 30 seconds.  That's
> usually plenty of time for the supplicant to scan, find the AP, initiate
> the 4-way handshake, and finish it, *especially* for WPA.  I'm very
> curious about why your setup is taking longer.  You can put the option
> "-dddt" into
> your /usr/share/dbus-1/system-services/fi.epitest.hostap.WPASupplicant.service file at teh end of the "Exec=" line, then 'killall -TERM wpa_supplicant', then attempt to reproduce the issue, and mail me /var/log/wpa_supplicant.log so we can see what's going on.

I'll note that wpa_supplicant itself uses a timeout of 70 seconds for WPA
authentication. You can see this if you monitor the supplicant using wpa_cli
while the supplicant authenticates.

As another data point, on my AI TouchBook with RAlink RT3070, it frequently
takes much longer than 30 seconds to authenticate to my WPA-EAP network. I
don't know that there's any specific reason other than that there's a lot of
other networks in the neighborhood and a lot of interference.

-- 
  -- Howard Chu
  CTO, Symas Corp.           http://www.symas.com
  Director, Highland Sun     http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
  Chief Architect, OpenLDAP  http://www.openldap.org/project/