GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 429419
many devices need to be down'ed before changing essid
Last modified: 2007-04-24 17:09:20 UTC
Hi! In https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/78037 a lot of people have various WiFi cards which refuse to change ESSID while being up. Their workaround is sudo ifconfig [interface] down sudo iwconfig [interface] essid [essid] key [key] sudo ifconfig [interface] up sudo dhclient3 [interface] but n-m keeps the interface up when changing ESSID. Any chance that this can be generally be done? Thank you in advance!
What drivers? These drivers need to be fixed. Furthermore, wpa_supplicant is controlling the connection process for NetworkManager now, and therefore these cards won't work with wpa_supplicant either, right? The only bits of NM that actually set SSID are used for clearing the SSID when the device isn't used, and that's not strictly necessary. In the end, if the driver cannot change SSID when it is up, the driver is broken and must be fixed.
Seems like a problem only with rt2500 cards from the launchpad report. Which driver is that, the old non-mac80211 driver or the new mac80211-based driver?
Created attachment 86338 [details] Output of lsmod I'm affected by this bug and I'm attaching the output of lsmod. The module is rt2500. Does this tell you what you need to know?
According to the Ubuntu bug, this also affects the hostap driver (PCMCIA Linksys WPC11 with a Prism III inside). It affects the older non-mac80211 rt2500 driver.
I don't think hostap is affected by this. It resets the card when setting SSID, just like prism54 does. if ((!local->fw_ap && hostap_set_string(dev, HFA384X_RID_CNFDESIREDSSID, local->essid)) || hostap_set_string(dev, HFA384X_RID_CNFOWNSSID, local->essid) || local->func->reset_port(dev)) return -EINVAL; Again, if setting the SSID (or BSSID) does not trigger a reassociation attempt in the driver, the driver is busted. That's the way WEXT works... Can somebody with an rt2500 card on Ubuntu try using wpa_supplicant with _unencrypted_ or _WEP_ networks and the "-Dwext" driver and see if they can get it connecting to an AP?
Created attachment 86465 [details] Output of wpa_supplicant I'm attaching the output of "wpa_supplicant -Dwext -ira0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf". I successfully associated to my unencrypted AP with this, even though the output contains lots of association failed messages.
I think comment #6 contains the requested information.
That driver is _busted_. Needs to be fixed. Furthermore, we'll be running wpa_supplicant _all_ the time with 0.7, so it needs to be fixed in the driver by 0.7 anyway.