problems caused by ESSID not being set

[Jouni Malinen]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2003 at 08:11:49PM +0200, Santiago Garcia Mantinan wrote:

> I believe what I found out related to monitor mode has a lot to do with
> another small issue when trying to enter mater mode, and it is that you must
> set an essid to enter master, it doesn't suffice to have an essid set via
> essid any as shows this example:

Prism2 has two different SSID configuration items (desired and own).
Setting essid to 'any' and then associating with an AP does not set
these SSIDs to non-empty values. Prism2 station firmware gets really
confused if Host AP mode is entered in such a state and Host AP driver
thus rejects the request to use Master mode with such a configuration.

> Well, similarly, you must set an essid before getting into monitor mode, if
> you don't do it and the essid is set to "" (any without having register to
> any AP), you'll find that you cannot set the frequencies under monitor mode
> and everything becomes borked, like I show here, even though kismet starts
> up, only that the hopper is disabled because of the frequencies problem:

Yes, this is an example of the Host AP mode confusion in the firmware..
Current version of the driver uses Host AP mode in Monitor mode. This
should probably be changed to use pseudo-IBSS instead. Actually, the
driver first tries this and only later goes to Host AP mode. I'll fix
this at some point. However, this might need to be configurable, since
Host AP mode seems to allow a bit less limited sending of some frames
when the card is in monitor test mode.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA