hostapd, b43, nl80211 driver, WPA: report, and two questions

[Francis Galiegue]

Hello,

>
>
>  > * if the b43 network interface is within a bridge (the bridge's MAC
>  > address is _not_ the one of the b43 FWIW), unencrypted works, however
>  > WPA does not; is this a hostapd only problem, or does the kernel need
>  > some more support for this? Would it be helpful that I provide some
>  > logs (I have a problem with the 25k message limit though, since logs
>  > are HUGE with hostapd in debug mode)?
>
>  Did you configure both the WLAN ifname (interface=...) and bridge ifname
>  (bridge=...) in hostapd.conf? hostapd needs to know the bridge interface
>  name in order to be able to send and receive EAPOL frames properly. Feel
>  free to email a debug log file directly to me (j at w1.fi) if needed due to
>  message length limits on the mailing list.
>

The comments in hostapd.conf say that this bridge parameter is only
valid for the ath5k and hostap drivers... Misleading? (I shamelessly
admit that I didn't plunge into the code yet.)

I'll try that and report.

>
>  > * with WPA PSK working, I get this loop in hostapd's stdout:
>  >
>  > ----
>  > wlan0: STA 00:15:00:35:12:e0 IEEE 802.11: disassociated
>  > wlan0: STA 00:15:00:35:12:e0 IEEE 802.11: authenticated
>  > # accounting session number increases by 1 every iteration
>  > wlan0: STA 00:15:00:35:12:e0 IEEE 802.11: associated (aid 1,
>  > accounting session 481A24F5-0000003C)
>  > wlan0: STA 00:15:00:35:12:e0 WPA: pairwise key handshake completed (WPA)
>  > wlan0: STA 00:15:00:35:12:e0 WPA: group key handshake completed (WPA)
>  > ----
>  >
>  > is this expected?
>
>  If that happens constantly, no, I would not expect it. I do not know
>  what is triggered the disconnection based on this log excerpt, though.
>  Anyway, if you have not configured hostapd to rekey frequently, the
>  connection should remain up without any additional associations at this
>  point.
>

Well, I've left the default configuration apart from the driver and
WPA settings. I'll have a closer look.

The AP has been working fine for several days apart from these two
small problems.

Have fun!
-- 
Francis Galiegue, fgaliegue at gmail.com
"It seems obvious [...] that at least some 'business intelligence'
tools invest so much intelligence on the business side that they have
nothing left for generating SQL queries" (St?phane Faroult, in "The
Art of SQL", ISBN 0-596-00894-5)