Hello I have managed to get my rtl8187 based wireless USB dongle (a Netgear WG111/v2) working in master mode - but with some strange problems and some even stranger workarounds. But first things first - i have attached the modifications i have made to the driver (patch is against wireless-dev git head) - they are not really doing anything else than simply "enabling" master mode. It doesn't seems to be sending any beacons when simply put into master mode (should the driver somehow tell mac80211 that it's not generating them itself?) But when i use hostapd everything seems to be working - until i try to associated... Without any encyption i could associated my laptop to the ap (actually a Linksys NSLU2 using big-endian arm) - but i couldn't get any data both ways. My laptop would see the packages sent from the ap and answer them, but the ap wouldn't get the packages - at least most of the time :/ Furthermore my laptop disconnected from the ap every 5 (or maybe 10) seconds and associated with the ap again. But when i started tcpdump on my nslu2, so i could find out what was going wrong, it suddenly worked. I could send data both ways without any problems - but my laptop was disconnecting and reconnecting about every 5 seconds when it wasn't receiving anything. As a temporary workaround i can keep the connection alive by having a ping running in the background. And well beside of that it seems to be working just fine - even with encryption. So why does it suddenly work when i start tcpdump? It's putting the interface into promiscous mode but when i tried to do that manually it didn't work... And why does the client keep on disconnection after a short time of inactivity? Is an accesspoint usually sending some sort of keep-alive packets that mac80211 doesn't send automatically when the interface is in master mode? I really hope someone can help me out with this. - Kasper F. Brandt
Attachment:
rtl8187-enable-mastermode.patch
Description: Binary data
