Apple Airport 802.11b and WPA

[torsti76]

Hi all,

a few days ago I bought a La Fonera+ and flashed the current Gargoyle version 1.0.2. First of all: It's one of the most functional and stylish web interfaces I've ever encountered!

Now for my problem: I set up WLAN with WPA PSK, and it works perfectly with two different Windows XP notebooks.

But whenever I try to connect with my good old PowerBook G4 Titanium, I get "Invalid Passphrase". The very same PowerBook speeks WPA with my Fritz!Box, so the problem must be somewhere else.

Now, if I'm running hostapd in the foreground, I get the following debug output whenever I try to connect using the PowerBook:

ath0: STA 00:30:65:xx:xx:xx IEEE 802.11: associated
ioctl[IEEE80211_IOCTL_DELKEY]: No such file or directory
ioctl[IEEE80211_IOCTL_SETMLME]: No such file or directory
ath0: STA 00:30:65:xx:xx:xx IEEE 802.11: deauthenticated due to local deauth request
ath0: STA 00:30:65:xx:xx:xx IEEE 802.11: disassociated

Googling for the failing ioctl calls, I found that this might be due to an incompatibility between specific madwifi and hostapd versions. I updated hostapd and wpa_supplicant to the latest kamikaze builds, but that didn't solve the problem, either.
Updating kmod_madwifi via opkg bricked the Fonera and I had to reflash the Gargoyle image.

Thus, several questions arose:
1.) Are the stock atheros Kamikaze kernel and the atheros Gargoyle kernel the same? Can I simply flash the Kamikaze kernel instead of the one provided by Gargoyle? Are the kernel modules binary compatible?
2.) Given, I want to compile my own kernel, is there a "Gargoyle-Toolchain", or can I just use the build instructions of OpenWRT Kamikaze?
3.) Did someone else encounter the above problem, or does some have a 802.11b client device that can do WPA and could try the above setup?

Thanks in advance!
Torsti

[torsti76]

Update: After reading the install instructions for Gargoyle again, I added the line

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src gargoyle http://gargoyle-router.com/packages/kamikaze0809/atheros-2.6

to my /etc/opkg.conf and ran opkg upgrade. Now I have the somewhat newer madwifi module and the new hostapd and wpa_supplicant, but trying to connect via airport still leads to the result shown in my first post...

I also checked out the SVN version and took a look at the build script (thus, getting answers to my questions about toolchain, special kernel and such .

But since I found no documentation about this: Is there a particular reason, why the madwifi components are nailed to r13000 of the openwrt svn?

Best regards
Torsti

[Eric]

Yeah... that's actually very recent.

There's a problem with madwifi in the most recent releases of openwrt: ap+client mode fails horribly and it's caused a lot of problems.

Reverting to openwrt svn r13000 fixes the problem... but seems to cause a couple other (more minor ones). I'm working on pinning down the exact cause of the problem, but until then we're stuck with this ugly hack.

My more recent testing suggests the problem is more recent than I first thought. Try setting that variable to 15464 instead of 13000 and see if that fixes your problem. I think ap+client will work there, but I'm not 100% sure because the problem with ap+client tends to show up only a couple hours after testing is started.

If you're interested in what's going on with any feature/aspect of the code you might want to check out the revision log in the TRAC (http://trac.assembla.com/gargoyle-router/) Each SVN commit is tagged with an explanation of what's going on.

[torsti76]

Hi Eric,

thanks for your suggestions.

I tried -r 15464 with the same result: WPA from Windows works, WPA from Apple Airport doesn't work.

On a side note, the ntpclient seems to be broken in SVN, i.e. I can't set anything in "System->Time" after restoring my old config. I looked at /etc/config/system and /etc/cobnfig/ntpclient and everything looks pretty valid to me. Also, ps aux shows that ntpclient is running with the given config. Nethertheless, date and time are set to epoch. I fixed the date manually for now...

In a next try to get WPA working with Airport, I now build everything from kamikaze HEAD revision.

What setups are affected by the AP+Client bug? I only need an access point with WPA, no fancy stuff like WDS or wireless bridges.

Best regards
Torsten

[torsti76]

Update:

I now built the images using the HEAD revision of svn://svn.openwrt.org/openwrt/branches/8.09/

When restoring my config, I left out /etc/config/ntpclient this time and could setup ntpclient properly again thru the webinterface.

Anyway, my Apple problem persists.

I'm now trying to build a pure openwrt trunk (without Gargoyle for the moment) with kernel 2.6.30.3 to see, if bleeding edge has the same ioctl issues...

Best regards,
Torsten

[torsti76]

I just noticed another weirdness:

root@fonera:~# cat /var/run/hostapd-ath0.conf

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ctrl_interface=/var/run/hostapd-ath0
driver=madwifi
interface=ath0
hw_mode=b
bridge=br-lan
ssid=XXXXX-WLAN
debug=0
wpa=1
wpa_pairwise=TKIP
country_code=de
wpa_passphrase=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

root@fonera:~# iwpriv ath0 get_mode

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ath0      get_mode:11g

root@fonera:~# iwpriv ath0 mode 11b
root@fonera:~# iwpriv ath0 get_mode

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ath0      get_mode:11g

So it seems, the driver is not able to switch to 11b (neither permanent nor temporary).

The tracker of madwifi-ng suggests that this issue was fixed with -r 2250, but there still seem to be lots of interoperability problems between certain hostapd/wpa_supplicant/madwifi versions.

*sigh*