Problems making WPA work with ndiswrapper/broadcom

[Jouni Malinen]

On Wed, Aug 18, 2004 at 11:07:58AM -0300, Donald Teed wrote:

> I've increased it to 20 seconds.  It might sound strange, but
> we've seen DHCP timeouts with broadcom hardware that have
> never been experienced with other brands.  Even on Windows
> and PXE boot.  So I've learned that this hardware can be
> clunky to get started.

That did not seem to change anything the debug log from wpa_supplicant
did not show association event from the driver.

> Authentication with 00:00:00:00:00:00 timed out.
> 
> I don't know why the process starts with a good MAC for the AP
> and then ends with 00:00...

That's like to be because the BSSID is not updated before the
association has actually happened.

> Wow.  OK, wireless sniffers for Windows cost about $1700 and
> we don't have the budget for it.  What is the state of wireless
> sniffers in Linux?  Will they work over ndiswrapper with a half
> working set up, or should I use a PC card that is natively supported
> in Linux like the truemobile 1150 (hermes chipset based)?
> I last tried a sniffer package called Kismet about 2 years ago
> and I gave up.  I was able to use the wireless device OK, but
> Kismet was just busted (at the time).

Latest Ethereal version with a good Linux driver with monitor mode
support is going to compare very favorably with more or less any Windows
sniffer you can buy..

AFAIK, current NDIS does not support raw IEEE 802.11 packets, so
ndiswrapper is not likely to be very useful as a wireless sniffer.
Nowadays, I'm mostly using Atheros-based cards for wireless sniffing.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA