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quantumphaze

Member

From: Melbourne, Australia

Registered: 2008-11-14

Posts: 175

wpa_supplicant drops madwifi

It seems that wpa_supplicant no longer supports the madwifi driver interface. It just exits giving me a "driver not supported" error. (I can't quote it right now since I fixed it and it has since left Konsole's buffer).

Madwifi itself (as in ath_pci and friends) supposedly supports the wext driver interface, however it doesn't work for me. It gets stuck trying to authenticate and timing out forever. Oddly enough, when I use Wicd, it still does the auth-time-out loop but suddenly starts working (and gets an IP) when I click disconnect (WTF?).

I had to recompile wpa_supplicant and modify it's config to make it use madwifi.

0. Firstly copy madwifi and wpa_supplicant from abs to your favourite build workspace
1. Download and extract madwifi (makepkg -o), wpa_supplicant needs some of the source
2. Uncomment line 53 and 55 in wpa_supplicant/config and change the path in line 55 to point to the madwifi src. eg:

# Driver interface for madwifi driver
CONFIG_DRIVER_MADWIFI=y
# Set include directory to the madwifi source tree
CFLAGS += -I/home/yourhome/builds/madwifi/src/madwifi

3. The PKGBUILD will have an md5 sum section for that config file and makepkg will fail unless you fix that. Just remove it for the easy way out
4. You should be able to build and install now

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hokasch

Member

Registered: 2007-09-23

Posts: 1,461

Re: wpa_supplicant drops madwifi

thanks, quantum!

.:B:.

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2006-11-26

Posts: 5,819

Website

Re: wpa_supplicant drops madwifi

Is there a reason why devs dropped it? I think those cards are still pretty popular no? And madwifi still seems widely used to me too...

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Got Leenucks? :: Arch: Power in simplicity :: Get Counted! Registered Linux User #392717 :: Blog thingy

quantumphaze

Member

From: Melbourne, Australia

Registered: 2008-11-14

Posts: 175

Re: wpa_supplicant drops madwifi

Madwifi cards are supposed to support the WEXT driver interface as well as the madwifi driver interface. (That's the way that wpa_supplicant communicates with the drivers, not the drivers them selves.)

I'm not sure that the dropping of madwifi interface was intentional since it could have been disabled by default upstream, and just packaged as-is. You will have to interrogate the package maintainer yourself.

Anyway:
It seems that they have reverted quite a few packages, including wpa_supplicant. No need to worry too much any more.

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SubGothius

Member

Registered: 2009-04-07

Posts: 13

Re: wpa_supplicant drops madwifi

I've had no prob using the standard wpa_supplicant with madwifi via the WEXT driver interface, like so:

# ifconfig ath0 up
# iwconfig ath0 essid mySSIDgoesHere
# wpa_supplicant -B -Dwext -i ath0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
# dhcpcd ath0

I was having issues connecting automatically to a hidden ssid using a netcfg profile, but that was solved by adding scan_ssid=1 to my network={} section in /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -- this also allowed me to get the ath5k driver working with WPA instead of having to use madwifi, although the /etc/network.d/examples/wpa.example configs didn't work as-is and needed significant tweaking. See details and working config files here.

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Best regards,
-Tye
"In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is." (-Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut)

paramthegreat

Member

Registered: 2006-06-27

Posts: 38

Re: wpa_supplicant drops madwifi

Thanks quantum! The "wext" interface was working for me, but my upstream and downstream bandwith was 10% of what I should be getting. I switched over to madwifi and I'm now up to 90% bandwidth. Offcourse, I do have a crappy wireless nic, but it performs much better on windows (manufacturer's drivers)

Any recommendations for wireless nic that perform at full throttle in linux

R00KIE

Forum Fellow

From: Between a computer and a chair

Registered: 2008-09-14

Posts: 4,734

Re: wpa_supplicant drops madwifi

There is always the option of using the good known to work windows drivers with ndiswrapper although native linux drivers seem to give you less problems.
Giving it a try doesn't hurt anyway

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R00KIE
Tm90aGluZyB0byBzZWUgaGVyZSwgbW92ZSBhbG9uZy4K

taroikai

Member

Registered: 2009-08-21

Posts: 3

Re: wpa_supplicant drops madwifi

I followed quantum's instructions to rebuild madwifi support into wpa_supplicant, and made a big progress. But I'm having a problem in the next step. Here's the output of command:

wpa_supplicant -B -Dmadwifi -i wlan0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -dd

.....
.....
Initializing interface (2) 'wlan0'
Interface wlan0 set UP - waiting a second for the driver to complete initialization
SIOCGIWRANGE: WE(compiled)=22 WE(source)=21 enc_capa=0xf
  capabilities: key_mgmt 0xf enc 0xf flags 0x0
WEXT: Operstate: linkmode=1, operstate=5
ioctl[IEEE80211_IOCTL_SETPARAM]: Operation not supported
wpa_driver_madwifi_init: failed to set wpa_supplicant-based roaming
WEXT: Operstate: linkmode=0, operstate=6
Failed to initialize driver interface
Failed to add interface wlan0
Cancelling scan request
Cancelling authentication timeout

Can anyone suggest why IEEE80211_IOCTL_SETPARAM is failing?

-Taro

Last edited by taroikai (2009-08-21 18:45:00)

quantumphaze

Member

From: Melbourne, Australia

Registered: 2008-11-14

Posts: 175

Re: wpa_supplicant drops madwifi

Try using the interface ath0 instead of wlan0

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taroikai

Member

Registered: 2009-08-21

Posts: 3

Re: wpa_supplicant drops madwifi

I figured out my problem.

I was attempting WPA/PSK on Thinkpad X31 with an Atheros AR5211 based wireless chip. I think this chip just doesn't support WPA. I remember having the same problem on Windows a couple of years ago. For a test, I tried an unsecured setup, and it worked flawlessly (using the wext driver, not madwifi).

I then booted the same machine with a Mint Linux live CD, tried wicd, and got the same result. Unsecure wireless works, but not the WPA. The same live CD allowed my other machine, Thinkpad X40 with a slightly different numbered Atheros chip, to work fine with either nonsecure or a WPA protected access point.

Let me know if anyone finds this contrary to truth.

Taro

taroikai

Member

Registered: 2009-08-21

Posts: 3

Re: wpa_supplicant drops madwifi

One more thing.

My access point was using channel 12. The atheros card in my Thinkpad X31 apparently does not operate above channel 11. Once I changed the channel on my access point, things started working much better.