/home/rafl

Have you ever been bitten by a problem that resets all wifi settings like mode, essid and whatnot just some seconds after you set them? A certain mister Dreker suggest to simply shut down wpa_supplicant on that machine if it is running, as it always resets such settings to be able to receive all packets from all access points.

So, after doing so I now know why my wifi access point, which is just a normal Debian box, wasn't working for the last couple of months. For some reason wpa_supplicant was installed and running.. I just can't remember to have installed it as it hardly makes sense to me. Anyway, after I could set the wifi settings again I thought it wouldn't be much of a problem to get hostapd with WPA-EAP working again. Wrong!

wpa_supplicant on the client side somehow thought it was authenticated, but it actually wasn't. So I checked the debug output of hostapd which said something like that:

ioctl[IEEE80211_IOCTL_SETMLME]: Argument list too long

and after that line it said the it deauthenticated the client because of a local request, so I thought that's the problem. It pretty much looks like a binary incompatibility to me. I updated the madwifi drivers before in an attempt to to fix the essid reset problem, so hostapd, which needs to be compiled against the madwifi headers didn't work properly anymore. So I tried to recompile it and things got even worse:

ioctl[unknown???]: Operation not supported

I had no idea what to do about that, so I joined #madwifi on freenode. I have been told that I'll need at least hostapd 0.4.whatnot to make it run with madwifi-ng. Unstable has 0.5.0, so I downloaded that package, which contains madwifi-ng includes do build against, and compiled it on my sarge box. Almost exactly in the moment I was done I found out that I would need hostapd 0.5.2 to make it work with madwifi-ng and WPA2. Grr...

So I compiled it again, installed it and everything should have run fine. For some reason it didn't. After a while starting and stopping it to take a look at the debug output it somehow started to work and it keeps working up to now. I have actually no idea what could have caused that problem. Stijn Tintel on #madwifi could think of re-keying at the wrong moment or something like that, but isn't quite sure about that.

Anyway, wifi is up and working again and that makes me happy. :-)