2008-04-29 08:13:52

by Lorenzo Nava

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: BCM4308 rev 3 owner, willing to help (want to make an access point)

Francis Galiegue wrote:

> I've started reading documentation on wireless.kernel.org, and don't
> understand much of it (nl80211, mac80211, cfg80211... Many things to
> learn about).
>
> Right now I'm stuck at the "setting the card to master mode": iwconfig
> wlan0 mode master returns "Invalid argument". The card works fine with
> other modes though.
>

If you look for the thread "Does mac80211 support ap mode" in the
mailing list archive you can find some infos.
You have to download the patch "allow-ap-vlan-mode.patch" that you can
find at http://johannes.sipsolutions.net/patches/kernel/all/LATEST/
Then you have to install hostapd (version 0.6.3) with nl80211 driver
(you can find all the informations that you need in the hostapd site).
At the moment you can't enable master mode with iwconfig, you can do
it only with hostapd.


Now here is my problem: I have a BCM4306 (b43 driver) with kernel
2.6.25-rc9 and hostapd-0.6.3 installed. I tested the card performance
with a simple test. The configuration of the network for the test was:
an access point (my computer with BCM4306) and 2 clients (both using
b43 driver). I used no encryption and work with 11M rate.
I sent a CBR traffic (11M) from the 2 clients to the access point.
When I started transmit packets from clients they disconnected from
the AP until I didn't stop the transmission. Hostapd print this
message that I've never seen before:
_Failed to set beacon head/tail_

The problem is related to hostapd? Maybe when the AP processes a lot
of traffic it was unable to generate beacons correctly?

As the final goal of the experiment was to try 80211e performance, I
tried the ad-hoc network mode, but I saw that the stations don't use
qos support. Can I use qos with ad-hoc network?

Thank you

regards


2008-04-30 21:18:38

by Francis Galiegue

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: BCM4308 rev 3 owner, willing to help (want to make an access point)

2008/4/29 Lorenzo Nava <[email protected]>:
[...]
>
> If you look for the thread "Does mac80211 support ap mode" in the
> mailing list archive you can find some infos.
> You have to download the patch "allow-ap-vlan-mode.patch" that you c=
an
> find at http://johannes.sipsolutions.net/patches/kernel/all/LATEST/
> Then you have to install hostapd (version 0.6.3) with nl80211 driver
> (you can find all the informations that you need in the hostapd site=
).
> At the moment you can't enable master mode with iwconfig, you can do
> it only with hostapd.
>

OK, I got it all working with:

- wireless-testing kernel,
- libnl 1.1,
- git master branch of hostapd.

But I cannot do WPA, only "clear text".

The thing is, my wlan interface is part of a bridge, and the bridge is
set up as:

brctl addif br0 eth0
brctl addif br0 wlan0

where wlan0 is the b43. I know nada about WPA, but can this have an
influence? The MAC address of the bridge is the one of the Ethernet
card, not the wireless one, and I specified wlan0 in hostapd.conf as
the interface to grab...
--=20
=46rancis Galiegue, [email protected]
"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=E9phane Faroult, in "The
Art of SQL", ISBN 0-596-00894-5)

2008-05-02 08:33:23

by Francis Galiegue

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: BCM4308 rev 3 owner, willing to help (want to make an access point)

2008/4/30 Francis Galiegue <[email protected]>:
>
> OK, I got it all working with:
>
> - wireless-testing kernel,
> - libnl 1.1,
> - git master branch of hostapd.
>
> But I cannot do WPA, only "clear text".
>
> The thing is, my wlan interface is part of a bridge, and the bridge =
is
> set up as:
>
> brctl addif br0 eth0
> brctl addif br0 wlan0
>
> where wlan0 is the b43. I know nada about WPA, but can this have an
> influence? The MAC address of the bridge is the one of the Ethernet
> card, not the wireless one, and I specified wlan0 in hostapd.conf as
> the interface to grab...
>

It looks like the bridge makes hostapd (well, WPA at least) unhappy.

If the b43 is not in a bridge, WPA works... Is that a hostapd problem o=
nly?

--=20
=46rancis Galiegue, [email protected]
"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=E9phane Faroult, in "The
Art of SQL", ISBN 0-596-00894-5)