WPA-PSK only authenticates if essid is broadcast

[Tolunay Orkun]

Charles,

I am in a similar situation. I have a Dell Latitude D600 with TrueMobile 
1400 card (Broadcom chipset - no native Linux driver).

The current working solution is to use ap_scan=2 and have your network 
entry as the first entry in the config file. This forces you to change 
the config file when you move to a different network. Less than ideal 
and I think it was basically a hack. It may work for stationary hosts 
but for roaming laptops this is great pain.

I think if wpa_supplicant could combine the results of AP scan as well 
as try connecting with the network entries that are market hidden in the 
config file this would not be an issue. When I have some time, I will 
try to patch wpa_supplicant to do this. I've asked in this list about it 
(with cc to Jouni) but got no response. Hopefully, we will get a 
response this time.

There is already a enhancement request in hostap bugzilla:
http://hostap.epitest.fi/bugz/show_bug.cgi?id=16

And here are my messages to HostAP and Ndiswrapper lists:

http://incognito.shmoo.com/pipermail/hostap/2005-April/010120.html
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=11527596

Best regards,
Tolunay

Charles Griffin wrote:
> Hello--
> 
> I am running Slackware 10.1 on a Dell 700m laptop which has the Dell
> 1450 dual band internal wireless (802.11a/b/g, 54 Mbps) integrated
> card.  I use ndiswrapper v1.1 and the windows driver along with
> wpa_supplicant 0.3.8 and it works great in connecting to my Apple
> airport extreme base station set with wpa-psk encryption.  The only
> problem is that wpa_supplicant will only find the router and
> authenticate if I set the essid to broadcast.  If the essid is not
> broadcast, wpa_supplicant says it cannot find any access point.
> 
> When I built wpa_supplicant, I used these options in my .config file:
> 
> CONFIG_DRIVER_NDISWRAPPER=y
> CONFIG_WIRELESS_EXTENSION=y
> CONFIG_EAP_PSK=y
> 
> My wpa_supplicant.conf file is:
> 
> network={
> ssid="myessid"
> scan_ssid=1
> key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
> psk="myencryptionkey"
> }
> 
> I would really like to be able to turn off my essid broadcast.  Any
> suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> TIA.
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