Re: ipw3945 and general WLAN questions

[Stefan Bellon <sbellon@sbellon.de>]

Christopher Nelson wrote:
> On Sat, May 06, 2006 at 08:59:25PM +0100, Anton Piatek wrote:
>   <snip> 
> > Of course that is fine for one wireless lan, but I am not sure
> > about the best way to get the wireless card to try several keys and
> > find the one that works on the current hotspot (please let me know
> > if you find a solution to that).

> I think that's where wpasupplicant could come in.  You can specify
> multiple network blocks, and I _think_ it tries them in the order
> listed in the file.  You would put your most-used network first, etc.

Ok, and the man page tells about priorities as well. This looks
promising.

At present I have /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf set to:

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
network={
        ssid="name"
        psk="pass"
}

And the relevant part of /etc/network/interfaces looks like this:

allow-hotplug eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp
wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

As soon as I modprobe ipw3945 the notebook indeed tries to connect to
the access point. However, sometimes this takes several minutes. The
quickest time I have measured were 30 seconds and once it took almost 5
minutes. I'm not sure whether this is to be expected?

Here's some relevant information from "iwlist eth1 scan":

eth1      Scan completed :
          Cell 01 - Address: 00:13:D3:6C:CC:46
                    ESSID:"name"
                    Protocol:IEEE 802.11bg
                    Mode:Master
                    Channel:6
                    Encryption key:on
                    Bit Rates:54 Mb/s
                    Extra: Rates (Mb/s): 1 2 5.5 9 11 6 12 18 24 36 48 54 
                    Quality=88/100  Signal level=-44 dBm  Noise level=-44 dBm
                    IE: WPA Version 1
                        Group Cipher : TKIP 
                        Pairwise Ciphers (1) : TKIP 
                        Authentication Suites (1) : PSK  
                    IE: IEEE 802.11i/WPA2 Version 1
                        Group Cipher : TKIP 
                        Pairwise Ciphers (1) : CCMP 
                        Authentication Suites (1) : PSK  
                    Extra: Last beacon: 1423ms ago

What am I missing?

-- 
Stefan Bellon