[I'm cc'ng Kel Modderman, the Debian maintainer of ndiswrapper and a
member of the Debian Madwifi team, who has been ful to me in the
past with wireless issues]

I recently had quite a frustrating time debugging a sudden ndiswsrapper
failure. No errors, but the card (a Broadcom 4318 Air Force One)
stubbornly refused to work. Earlier the same day, it had worked fine on
my home network, and now it wouldn't work on a public hot spot,
although the last time I had tried the hot spot, several weeks earlier,
it had worked fine.

By carefully following the ndiswrapper troubleshooting guide [0], I
eventually solved the problem; the card now required the essid to be
manually set before it would associate. The odd thing is that this did
not used to be the case; I hadn't experienced the problem before
because the card used to have the MS Windows-ish behavior of
associating with an open AP automatically. I see this even now with
kernel 2.6.21 / ndiswrapper 1.43, while kernel 2.6.22 / ndiswrapper
1.47 seems to require a manual setting of the essid, as above.

Is this a bug, a feature or a quirk of my setup? I note that my Atheros
PCMCIA card (driven by madwifi) still associates automatically, while
the Broadcom one doesn't with the 2.6.22 / 1.47 combination, and I
also notice that the Broadcom doesn't even with 2.6.21 when using
the bcm43xx native driver.

[0]
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/j...oubleshooting/

Celejar
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On Sat, 18 Aug 2007 12:27:46 am Celejar wrote:
> I recently had quite a frustrating time debugging a sudden ndiswsrapper
> failure. No errors, but the card (a Broadcom 4318 Air Force One)
> stubbornly refused to work. Earlier the same day, it had worked fine on
> my home network, and now it wouldn't work on a public hot spot,
> although the last time I had tried the hot spot, several weeks earlier,
> it had worked fine.
>
> By carefully following the ndiswrapper troubleshooting guide [0], I
> eventually solved the problem; the card now required the essid to be
> manually set before it would associate. The odd thing is that this did
> not used to be the case; I hadn't experienced the problem before
> because the card used to have the MS Windows-ish behavior of
> associating with an open AP automatically. I see this even now with
> kernel 2.6.21 / ndiswrapper 1.43, while kernel 2.6.22 / ndiswrapper
> 1.47 seems to require a manual setting of the essid, as above.
>
> Is this a bug, a feature or a quirk of my setup? I note that my Atheros
> PCMCIA card (driven by madwifi) still associates automatically, while
> the Broadcom one doesn't with the 2.6.22 / 1.47 combination, and I
> also notice that the Broadcom doesn't even with 2.6.21 when using
> the bcm43xx native driver.

Most likely driver "bug". I've not encountered a linux 802.11 driver that is
perfect so far, they all have subtle differences in operational semantics.

Its hard to say where the problem lay in your specific situation. It could be
that the driver is not handling the environment at the hotspot well or that
userspace is incorrectly handling the messages from driver to trigger/allow
network connection.

Thanks, Kel.


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