[Madwifi-devel] #1109 -- ad hoc nets invisible to Centrino on Windows

[Dennis E. <emb...@ho...>]

>>On Thu, 10 Apr 2008, Dennis Edwards wrote:
>> Hello. I am curious if anyone has looked at ticket #1109 lately, and if 
>>...
>On Thu, 10 Apr 2008, Derek Smithies wrote:
>...
>The beacon packets are crucial - these are the only packets that contain
>all the information about a network. Thus, any network scanner will read
>and dissect detected beacon packets.
>...
>Ticket 1109 describes the use of 0.9.2, which is, well, very old.
>Have you tried madwifi release 0.9.4? This is a good candidate for adhoc
>work.
>...

We did find the culprit to be in the beacon frame, as suspected. We 
conducted our preliminary tests on a custom driver based on r1497 as well 
as r3530 from trunk. The beacon Capability Information (a Fixed Parameter) 
has bit 9 (802.11 spectrum management required) set to true. Intel 
ProWireless 2200BG cards with at least driver version 9.0.4.37 (7/25/2007) 
don't like that bit being set and effectively ignore any such network 
offering. Running:

iwpriv athX doth 0

turns that bit off and brings great joy to b/g only land. There is, of 
course, a concern over FCC U-NII band regulatory compliance in USA should 
a user invoke subsequent operation of the driver in an 802.11a 
configuration, but I regard that as an operational issue. We also quite 
briefly tested an Intel 3945 ABG card with driver version 10.5.1.68 
(9/27/2006) and it, too, happily joined the ad hoc b/g test network. We 
will do more testing (with current drivers) and report any interesting 
problems that we may find. Things look good so far.

Dennis