Broadcast of SSID is required for wpa_supplicant?

[Donald Teed]

Given that ndiswrapper is the only option for broadcom
at the moment, it amounts to the same thing, but I didn't
make it clear that I was referring to ndiswrapper in my question.

Our network security is intending to deploy the Cisco 1000 APs
with the default of SSIDs not broadcast.

We've got a number of hurdles to clear: ndiswrapper needs to be
more stable (currently locks up with Xandros 2.4.26 kernel),
wpa has not worked yet, and we need the AP to do something
that won't happen.

Xandros are working on backing off kernel options and seeing
if there is one that is conflicting.  It would be great if
ndiswrapper could crash the machine with a kernel dump
instead of a lock up.

--Donald Teed


On Wed, 25 Aug 2004, Giridhar Pemmasani wrote:

> On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 20:10:17 -0300 (ADT), Donald Teed <dteed at artistic.ca> said:
>
>  Donald> A developer of ndiswrapper indicated that SSID broadcast on
>  Donald> the AP is required for wpa_supplicant to work.  I need to
>  Donald> determine if that is true, as I don't know if we can deploy
>  Donald> it in that case (assuming we could solve the other
>  Donald> problems).
>
> If you are quoting me, that is not what I said. I said "they should
> broadcast for ndiswrapper + wpa_supplicant to work" (if you need
> clarification, I have IRC logs).
>
> NDIS documentation that I could lay my hands on doesn't explain how
> scan can return stations that don't broadcast ssid. It mentions that
> the scan OID (OID_802_11_BSSID_LIST_SCAN) uses SSID, ScanType etc.,
> but I don't know how to pass that information to NDIS.
>
> If anyone knows how to do it, let me know. Until this is done,
> ndiswrapper won't be able to work with stations that don't broadcast
> ssid.
>
> --
> Giri
>
>