WPA failing to associate OK with Intersil chipset (redux)

[Alex Pounds]

Hello, 

Back in December I reported a problem I was having with my laptop's wifi
and WPA2. To date, I am unable to get it to hold a connection with my
wireless router, a Linksys WRT54GL, despite it working perfectly fine with
my desktop PC (also using wpa_supplicant). Details are available from the
thread here: 
http://lists.shmoo.com/pipermail/hostap/2006-December/014698.html
http://www.ethicsgirls.com/stuff/lspci.txt and
http://www.ethicsgirls.com/stuff/dmesg.txt may also be useful. 

I'm not entirely sure that the wifi card has the hardware to support WPA,
so that would probably be a good thing to check. Presuming that it does,
however, let me outline the current symptoms and see if anyone has any
bright ideas. 

Since last time I've upgraded the firmware, which should provide WPA
support. On startup, the card reports as follows: 

hostap_pci: Registered netdevice wifi0
wifi0: Original COR value: 0x0
prism2_hw_init: initialized in 196 ms
wifi0: NIC: id=0x8013 v1.0.0
wifi0: PRI: id=0x15 v1.1.1
wifi0: STA: id=0x1f v1.7.4
wifi0: Intersil Prism2.5 PCI: mem=0xf8000000, irq=11
wifi0: registered netdevice wlan0

The (abridged) dmesg log shows that my card flip-flops between associating
and non-associating (as well as having a weird thing for a 44:44:44
address): 

eth0: Trying to join BSSID 00:16:b6:xx:xx:xx
eth0: LinkStatus=1 (Connected)
eth0: LinkStatus: BSSID=00:16:b6:xx:xx:xx
eth0: invalid skb->cb magic (0x00000000, expected 0xf08a36a2)
eth0: LinkStatus=2 (Disconnected)
eth0: LinkStatus: BSSID=00:16:b6:xx:xx:xx
eth0: LinkStatus=2 (Disconnected)
eth0: LinkStatus: BSSID=00:16:b6:xx:xx:xx
eth0: LinkStatus=2 (Disconnected)
eth0: LinkStatus: BSSID=44:44:44:44:44:44
eth0: LinkStatus=2 (Disconnected)
eth0: LinkStatus: BSSID=44:44:44:44:44:44
eth0: manual reset request(2)
eth0: LinkStatus=2 (Disconnected)
eth0: LinkStatus: BSSID=00:16:b6:xx:xx:xx
eth0: LinkStatus=2 (Disconnected)


My wpa_supplicant.conf looks like this: 

network={
	#scan_ssid=1
	#priority=5
	#ssid="ourwifi"
	#psk="password"
	#psk=[hex string of 'password']


	ssid="ourwifi"
	bssid=00:16:B6:xx:xx:xx
	psk="password"
	priority=0
	scan_ssid=1
}


This compares to my desktop's wpa_supplicant.conf, that looks like this: 

network={
        ssid="ourwifi"
        #psk="password"
        psk=[hex string of 'password']
}


I've stuck a log of the wpa_supplicant output at
http://www.ethicsgirls.com/stuff/wifilog.txt . This was run by doing: 

wpa_supplicant -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -dd -w -Dhostap -ieth0 | tee wifilog.txt


I'm on wpa_supplicant version 0.5.5. Any ideas? 

Thank you, 

-- 
Alex Pounds (Creature)                  .~.         http://www.alexpounds.com/
                                        /V\        http://www.ethicsgirls.com/
                                       // \\
"Variables won't; Constants aren't"   /(   )\
                                       ^`~'^