Bugzilla – Bug 136235
essid not assigned to wireless card after using yast2
Last modified: 2006-06-14 08:01:34 UTC
I use yast2 to manage my aironet 350 minipci wlan card. Configuration settings like static ip, wep key etc. are normally set to the card after using yast2, but not the essid. Whatever I do, essid keeps showing up empty when viewing the configuration with iwconfig. Both at eth0 and wifi0 shows ESSID:"". The device uses the airo driver provided with SuSE 10.0. My guess is yast2 somehow fails to assign the essid to this device. I'll be glad to provide more information if needed.
please provide: iwconfig /var/log/YaST2/y2log after configuring the card. please attach the file, don't past it, thanks.
Created attachment 59658 [details] y2log, after configuration of new profile for wlan device eth0 Situation: Old configuration for eth0 was previous removed by use of yast2 lan. This y2log is the log of setting a new configuration for wlan device eth0 with essid 'test-essid'.
Created attachment 59659 [details] iwconfig output after configuration with yast2 lan iwconfig output after configuration with yast2 lan. yast2 finished normal, about 10 seconds later this was what iwconfig showed. Essid not set like configured with yast2.
Created attachment 59660 [details] iwconfig output after configuration with yast2 lan iwconfig output after configuration with yast2 lan. yast2 finished normal, about 10 seconds later this was what iwconfig showed. Essid not set like configured with yast2.
Created attachment 59661 [details] iwconfig output after configuration with yast2 lan iwconfig output after configuration with yast2 lan. yast2 finished normal, about 10 seconds later this was what iwconfig showed. Essid not set like configured with yast2.
Please ignore comments #4 and #5. Both are same as comment #3. When reporting the Bugzila server indicated communication failures, but apperantly the comment was placed anyway.
It looks like the airo driver can not show an assigned essid to the card without succesfull connection to a wireles network node (access point) with the same essid. Tested with: - yast/yast2, try to assign essid: above seems true - direct essid assignment with iwconfig: above seems true I think this moves the problem from yast to the airo driver. Airo driver should show assigned essid even if it can not succesfull connect to node with same essid.
Martin: Assign it back to us if this is nothing for you.
S.H., to check if the problem is with yast, look in /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-* if the ESSID is there. If not, it is my bug. Otherwise reassign to jg@suse.de.
ESSID names are stored in ifcfg-wlan-* by yast. Yast also reads ESSID values back to yast gui. Reassigning bug to jg@suse.de on request by Martin.
Well, do I understand correctly that the device works but it just doesn't show the ESSID in iwconfig output until associated? That's maybe not nice, but probably not worth fixing either.
(In reply to comment #11) > Well, do I understand correctly that the device works but it just doesn't show > the ESSID in iwconfig output until associated? That's maybe not nice, but > probably not worth fixing either. > The bug can be bigger then not showing the ESSID. Fi the driver might not hold/accept an ESSID if there is no network node in range (yet) with that ESSID. In wordt case it can even be a security risk if the driver goes in a default settings to accept any ESSID without the user knowing it.
Did you see your card associating to an access point other than the configured one yet?
I have to do make a test setup for this to be sure. (In reply to comment #13) > Did you see your card associating to an access point other than the configured > one yet? > I have to do make a test setup for this.
The card does not seem to associate to an access point other then the configured on. At least, there is no confirmation from the system it does and there is also no datatransfer indicating this. Main problem is probably buggy driver code so it does not behave very userfriendly. Users can not trust the output unless the card is associated to a network it was configured for. The airo driver can not show an assigned essid to the card without succesfull association to a wireles network it was configured for.
IMHO the problem is rather that the wireless extensions do not specify how the driver should behave here. In fact, the whole wireless LAN stuff in Linux is quite inhomogeneous, so we see similar problems in other areas, too. Hopefully this will improve.