WPA - testing

[Ricardo Carrano]

Hi!

We've been testing association with WPA APs. What follows are results on these tests
with build 650. The reason we are using this build and not another (newer one) is that 
it's been shipped, so we will have a lot of feedback on it.

As everybody knows, out-of-the-box 650 will _not_ connect to WPA APs. I hope the
following information will help us fix this for future releases and find a workaround
for 650.

First, let me describe two different procedures:

Procedure 1: Connecting from CLI and without NM:
# We use wpa_suplicant directly (without NetworkManager)
killall NetworkManager
if [ -e /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_suplicant.conf ]; then
 rm /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_suplicant.conf
fi
wpa_passphrase <ssid> <passphrase> > /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
wpa_supplicant -ieth0 -Dwext -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
dhclient eth0 

Procedure 2: Using auxiliary script to create networks.cfg script.
# We workaround the UI issue (dialog box) by creating the networks.cfg configuration 
# file "manually" (with the help of wpa.sh script).
   1. Copy http://wiki.laptop.org/images/4/44/Wpa.sh to your XO (any directory)
   2. Open the terminal activity
   3. Change to the directory you copied wpa.sh on step 1
   4. Execute the following command to have administrative privileges "su -"
   5. Execute the script "sh wpa.sh"
   6. Follow the instructions on screen, providing the SSID, passphrase and WPA version
of your Access Point
   7. Reboot the XO (as instructed in the end of step 6)
   8. Go to the mesh view and click on the circle of your AP, that should be showing as 
open now (no lock attached to the circle) 

Results:
--------
Procedure 1: success in more than 95% of the cases (which is more than I get in my HP
laptop). *But* we must keep in mind that WPA supplicant is very time sensitive. It may
timeout some times before it gets connected (you'll see this if you observe the outputs
of the wpa_supplicant command). In one case, it timed out 12 times before connecting. In
windows, for example, this is hidden from the user (it takes forever, but in the end it
connects).

Procedure 2: Success many times, but sometimes the dialog windows appears again and we
go back to square 1. This procedure is less predictable. For those who are not
interested in reading the script (which is very unpretentious), the idea is just to
collect essid, passphrase and wpa type from the user and write it to networks.cfg file
(hopefully in the proper format). So, we're trying to provide the information that UI is
not giving to NM.


I have my own feelings and thoughts about this but I will defer the conclusions to all
of you.


Cheers!
Ricardo Carrano