[Click] madwifi.stripped driver issues

[John Bicket]

Hi Nels,

Sorry there isn't much documentation on the driver - if you let me know 
a little more about what you're trying to do I can probably help you get 
a configuration that does what you want to.  

Here is some more info about the driver and what exactly it does and
why it's probably not doing what you expect:

The stripped driver functions a little differently that most device
drivers - it sends and receives 802.11 packets, not 802.3 (normal
ethernet). The normal madwifi driver handles this decapsulation and
encapsulation, and looks to linux like a ethernet driver. 
There are click elements that will do this for you
(see WifiDecap and WifiEncap in the elements/wifi directory).

Since linux doesn't understand
802.11 packets and has no stack built in for them, you must use a click
configuration to send and receive packets. (linux will just discard the
packets since they don't look like normal ethernet/ip packets).


There are some sample configurations in the madwifi.stripped/etc directory.

The madwifi.stripped driver is probably useful for you if you want to do
one of
- build your own access point with its own tx rate control, power
  control, or association rules.
- work in adhoc mode (to get around bssid partitions since it seems the
  802.11 spec doesn't really support mult-hop routing in practice).
- use click to design a handoff protocol.
- anything that uses 802.11 management packets (association,
  authentication) , but not control packets (acks, rts/cts).

  

Nels Anderson [Nels.Anderson at colorado.edu] wrote:
>Aloha,
>
>Greetings again, I'm having some issues getting the madwifi.stripped driver to
>function properly.  I built wifi-enabled click, using the latest from the cvs,
>pointing it appropriately to the madwifi.stripped driver.  It built fine, after
>I patched it into a 2.4.26 kernel, as did the madwifi.stripped driver itself.
>When I do 'modprobe ath_pci', ath_pci, ath_hal and click_wifi are loaded. 
>Everything seems fine up to this point, nothing aberrant shows up in
>/var/log/messages or anything like that.
>
>However, despite the fact that the modules are loaded, the card can't actually
>connect to anything.  I can set the essid however I please, but it can't find
>any access points.  I setup another machine with wireless in monitor mode and
>it couldn't see any packets from my machine, even though they were just a few
>feet away.  It could see packets from yet another machine across the room just
>fine though.  No packets are coming off the card at all, to the best of my
>knowledge.
>
>Now when I use the most recent sourceforge madwifi drivers, everything works
>fine.  So I don't think the card itself is bad. I've got a D-Link AirXpert
>(DWL-AG650) card.  I'm wondering if anything has seen this kind of thing before
>or know what else I could look at to try and figure out what's going on.  I
>realize this is a bit vague, but I'm sort of at a loss for what to check next
>myself.  If you need any more information, I'll provide as much as a I can.  As
>always, any assistance is greatly appreciated.  Thanks,
>
>-Nels
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