Hello
I have managed to get my rtl8187 based wireless USB dongle (a Netgear
WG111/v2) working in master mode - but with some strange problems and
some even stranger workarounds. But first things first - i have
attached the modifications i have made to the driver (patch is against
wireless-dev git head) - they are not really doing anything else than
simply "enabling" master mode. It doesn't seems to be sending any
beacons when simply put into master mode (should the driver somehow
tell mac80211 that it's not generating them itself?) But when i use
hostapd everything seems to be working - until i try to associated...
Without any encyption i could associated my laptop to the ap (actually
a Linksys NSLU2 using big-endian arm) - but i couldn't get any data
both ways. My laptop would see the packages sent from the ap and
answer them, but the ap wouldn't get the packages - at least most of
the time :/ Furthermore my laptop disconnected from the ap every 5 (or
maybe 10) seconds and associated with the ap again.
But when i started tcpdump on my nslu2, so i could find out what was
going wrong, it suddenly worked. I could send data both ways without
any problems - but my laptop was disconnecting and reconnecting about
every 5 seconds when it wasn't receiving anything. As a temporary
workaround i can keep the connection alive by having a ping running in
the background. And well beside of that it seems to be working just
fine - even with encryption.
So why does it suddenly work when i start tcpdump? It's putting the
interface into promiscous mode but when i tried to do that manually it
didn't work...
And why does the client keep on disconnection after a short time of
inactivity? Is an accesspoint usually sending some sort of keep-alive
packets that mac80211 doesn't send automatically when the interface is
in master mode?
I really hope someone can help me out with this.
- Kasper F. Brandt
Sorry, the patch was wrong. Here is the correct patch.
2007/6/15, Kasper F. Brandt <[email protected]>:
> Hello
> I have managed to get my rtl8187 based wireless USB dongle (a Netgear
> WG111/v2) working in master mode - but with some strange problems and
> some even stranger workarounds. But first things first - i have
> attached the modifications i have made to the driver (patch is against
> wireless-dev git head) - they are not really doing anything else than
> simply "enabling" master mode. It doesn't seems to be sending any
> beacons when simply put into master mode (should the driver somehow
> tell mac80211 that it's not generating them itself?) But when i use
> hostapd everything seems to be working - until i try to associated...
>
> Without any encyption i could associated my laptop to the ap (actually
> a Linksys NSLU2 using big-endian arm) - but i couldn't get any data
> both ways. My laptop would see the packages sent from the ap and
> answer them, but the ap wouldn't get the packages - at least most of
> the time :/ Furthermore my laptop disconnected from the ap every 5 (or
> maybe 10) seconds and associated with the ap again.
>
> But when i started tcpdump on my nslu2, so i could find out what was
> going wrong, it suddenly worked. I could send data both ways without
> any problems - but my laptop was disconnecting and reconnecting about
> every 5 seconds when it wasn't receiving anything. As a temporary
> workaround i can keep the connection alive by having a ping running in
> the background. And well beside of that it seems to be working just
> fine - even with encryption.
>
> So why does it suddenly work when i start tcpdump? It's putting the
> interface into promiscous mode but when i tried to do that manually it
> didn't work...
> And why does the client keep on disconnection after a short time of
> inactivity? Is an accesspoint usually sending some sort of keep-alive
> packets that mac80211 doesn't send automatically when the interface is
> in master mode?
>
> I really hope someone can help me out with this.
>
> - Kasper F. Brandt
>
>