No SSID after switching to AP mode

[Jouni Malinen]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 11:31:55PM -0400, Igor Gueths wrote:

> Hi all. I recently attempted to use Hostap, along with the Ath5k driver to put
> my AR5212-based card into AP mode, after having used Madwifi for quite some
> time. However, I am running into a rather interesting problem. After Hostap puts
> my device into Master mode, and I run Iwconfig wlan0, there appears to be no
> SSID set, even though I have one specified in Hostap.conf.

Not showing the SSID in iwconfig is known limitation or well, feature of
the mac80211 design. It does not mean that the actual behavior would be
different, though; this only applies to what iwconfig is able to show.

> I thought that possibly the SSID could be getting sent regardless of what
> Iwconfig output in the beacon frames;

That should be the case.

> however, none of the other wireless
> clients I have access to here (second laptop, IPhone, etc) could find my
> access point. Does anyone have any pointers as to where I should look, to
> attempt to figure out why no SSID is being set as part of the initialization
> process?

I'm not sure what to expect from ath5k in AP mode as far as the kernel
version that you are using is concerned. If you can run a wireless
sniffer on a separate device to monitor what exactly is exchanged
between the AP and a client, a capture log from the scan process would
be one of the best options as the next step.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA