creating new adhoc networks fails with ipw2200

[Jouni Malinen]

On Tue, Jun 27, 2006 at 03:14:22PM -0400, Dan Williams wrote:

> I seem to have run into a problem with this.  While I can create the
> network setup using something like the following.  I don't intend to
> join an _existing_ network; I want to create a totally new adhoc
> network.

That's not how IEEE 802.11 defines IBSS.. No new IBSS should be created
if there are existing stations using the same SSID.

> wpa_supplicant will never return a successful connection event until I
> set the frequency/channel on the card using 'iwconfig'.  This is with
> ipw2200.  Is this the way it's supposed to work?  I don't think so, but
> please correct me if I'm wrong.

It would be up to the driver to notify that the connection is completed.
I have done only limited testing of adhoc networks with Linux drivers,
though.

> One solution to this problem is to add a new configuration option to
> wpa_ssid for "frequency", and add the config parsing logic to
> ctrl_iface.c and the dbus side of things too.  If frequency was
> specified, wpa_supplicant would direct the card to lock to that
> frequency before any connection attempt and would unlock the frequency
> after disassociation.

This has actually already been implemented and is somewhere on my
things-to-merge list.. However, that frequency is _not_ for locking the
channel to avoid joining an existing network, it is for giving the new
channel for the case where no existing network is available.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA