[ath9k-devel] WPA and Apple devices

[Marek Lindner <lindner_marek@yahoo.de>]

On Thursday, October 27, 2011 04:19:30 Marek Lindner wrote:
> > Does the connection failure happen with both VAPs or only one of them?
> 
> IIRC both VAPs failed but I am going to retest to be certain.

The second VAP shows different behavior:
* Without encryption one get's a simple "unable to connect" error.
* With WPA enabled the iOS client connects and disconnects shortly thereafter. 
It keeps doing that forever.

All that only happens if VPA#1 is configured with WPA enabled.


> > > It looks like the mac80211/ath9k driver gets confused when WPA is
> > > activated on VAP#1. Furthermore, other all non-Apple device seem to
> > > work fine. Any idea how to debug it further ?
> > 
> > Would you be able to capture all the frames exchanged between the AP
> > and the station with a wireless sniffer? It would be interesting to see
> > sniffer capture both for a successful and failed connection attempts.
> 
> Yes, no problem. I will get the dumps and upload them somewhere.

The pcap files can be found here:
http://dev.cloudtrax.com/downloads/pcap/

These pcap files were captured while VAP#1 was WPA encrypted and VPA#2 was 
unencrypted. An Apple notebook tried to connect to the router on VAP#1:
apple-vap1.pcap -> captured packets on the notebook itself
vap1_vpa2_nowpa.pcap -> captured packets from the router (wifi interface)
mon_vpa2_nowpa.pcap -> captured packets from the router (hostapd monitor 
interface)

As you can see the Apple device even sends a few DHCP/DNS/etc packets until it 
suddenly sends a disconnect request. This made me think it is not related to 
hostapd but I could be wrong here.

Regards,
Marek