WEP and WDS

[Joe Parks]

On Mon, 05 Jul 2004 16:43:14 +0530
"sankpal_manisha" <sankpal_manisha at indiatimes.com> wrote:

> The WDS is configured by adding the MAC addresses of the APs and using iwpriv command(As per README file). WEP is also enabled by cmd
> 
> iwconfig wlan0 key 0123456789
 
I will assume that you've already tested without WEP and your WDS setup worked.   If this is not true you should check that first.

> when one AP tries to ping each other, it sends broadcast message. Why this is happening? 

An ARP request is broadcast the first time an interface attempts to contact an unfamiliar IP in order to determine its MAC address.   If broadcast packets aren't being encrypted/decrypted properly (which I suspect) then the MAC won't be resolved and the unicast packets will never be sent.

I too have had problems getting the command you mention above to work the way I expect it to.   Fortunately there is a better way:

hostap_crypt_conf -p $WLANx ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff WEP $WEPKEY

Should set a nice default key that works for both broadcast and unicast packets.