Does wpa_supplicant 0.4.9 support WE-21 with driver wext?

[Jouni Malinen]

On Thu, Mar 29, 2007 at 01:52:43PM +0200, Robert Allerstorfer wrote:

> I am running Fedora 6 (ppc) on my iBook, which has an internal AirPort
> Extreme wireless module, controlled by the Broadcom BCM4306 802.11b/g
> chipset. The bcm43xx-firmware files have been provided by extracting
> from 'AppleAirPort2' 3.90.34.0.p18 (405.1) and the bcm43xx driver from
> the 2.6.20-1.2933.fc6 kernel is loaded

> dmesg contains tons of these error messages:
> SoftMAC: Scanning finished: scanned 14 channels starting with channel 1
> SoftMAC: generic IE set to 30140100000fac040100000fac040100000fac020000
> SoftMAC: sent association request!
> SoftMAC: associating failed (reason: 0x19)!

That 0x19 status code in Association Response would indicate that the AP
rejected association due to the client not supporting Short Slot Time. I
would have expected BCM4306 to support this as a 802.11g card, so I
would guess that SoftMAC is not setting the Short Slot Time flag
correctly. As such, I do not think this issue has anything to do with
wpa_supplicant and this should be reported to SoftMAC maintainers
instead.

Linux MAINTAINERS file has following to say about contact info:

SOFTMAC LAYER (IEEE 802.11)
P:      Johannes Berg
M:      johannes at sipsolutions.net
P:      Joe Jezak
M:      josejx at gentoo.org
P:      Daniel Drake
M:      dsd at gentoo.org
W:      http://softmac.sipsolutions.net/
L:      netdev at vger.kernel.org
S:      Maintained


(though, I would recommend  replacing netdev with
linux-wireless at vger.kernel.org and you may even find a SoftMAC specific
mailing list by going to the web site mentioned above).


> I read somewhere[1] that there "is a wpa_supplicant WE-21
> incompatibility problem". So, my question is, is wpa_supplicant 0.4.9
> known to fully support the Wireless Extension v21 using this external
> bcm43xx driver? What would be the solution? Upgrading wpa_supplicant
> to 0.4.10 or better 0.5.7? Downgrading the kernel to 2.6.18 FC6
> originally came with? Giving up?

I believe this issue with SSID length was already resolved with 0.4.9.
In this case, the first issue would likely need to fixing SoftMAC (or
alternatively configuring the AP not to reject STAs based on Short Slot
Time).

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA