Unicast packets stop being transmitted to a particular station, under load, when WPA2 is enabled

[Ben Greear]

On 05/11/2014 09:56 PM, Avery Pennarun wrote:
> On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 12:05 AM, Ben Greear <greearb at candelatech.com> wrote:
>> On 05/11/2014 08:54 PM, Avery Pennarun wrote:
>>> On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 11:09 PM, Ben Greear <greearb at candelatech.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>> Also, have you tried sniffing with a third device to see if
>>>> the AP actually puts the ICMP responses on the air?
>>>
>>> I did try that.  As far as I can tell, the ICMP responses are simply
>>> not being sent at all.
>
> I was incorrect about this because I was looking at the wrong data.  I
> tested again with a more obvious method, running "ping -i0.01
> 192.168.1.107" where 107 is the address of my macbook.  With 100
> packets per second, they overwhelm the rest of the traffic so it's
> easy to see whether they're coming through.
>
> The AP definitely *is* transmitting the packets on the air.  Even my
> macbook can see them in the radiotap tcpdump mode, but it doesn't see
> them at the IP layer.  So they are either being encrypted wrong or my
> macbook is decrypting them wrong, I guess.
>
> I think I'll try using wireshark and see what it thinks...
>
>> I haven't dug into many of the stats yet, but it's possible the
>> ath10k debugfs file would show some types of transmit errors in this case?
>
> Possibly.  Can you give me a hint of where to look?  I don't really
> know what these files do.
>
>> Might be interesting to see how long it takes the AP to generate
>> the tx status response for the transmitted ICMP packets.  My firmware
>> has some extended tx status, but I'm not sure it has anything overly
>> useful for your case...I was mostly concerned with the tx rate reporting
>> when writing it.
>
> I can try it with your firmware if you think there is useful data to
> gather, although since it turned out my earlier statement wasn't true
> maybe this is less important :)

If it's getting on the air, then I think the only way to figure out
what is wrong is to decode the packets and see if they are encrypted
properly or not.  I think there is a way to get wireshark to decode
pkts by feeding it the proper keys, but I have not ever actually tried
doing that.

If pkts do not get on the air, then possibly the tx status and/or tx
error counters could tell you why, but it seems that is not relevant
in this case.

Thanks,
Ben


-- 
Ben Greear <greearb at candelatech.com>
Candela Technologies Inc  http://www.candelatech.com