kern/130820: [ndis] wpa_supplicant(8) returns 'no space on device'

[Erwin Hoffmann]

Hi

thanks for following my bug-report:

--On Donnerstag, 5. März 2009 01:43 +0000 linimon at FreeBSD.org wrote:

> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=130820

From: "Paul B. Mahol" <onemda at gmail.com>
To: linimon at freebsd.org
Cc: freebsd-net at freebsd.org, freebsd-bugs at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: kern/130820: [ndis] wpa_supplicant(8) returns 'no space on
device'

Yet another invalid bug report.
OP should use -Dndis and not -Dbsd

--

I did not reply to the comment, because of it's obvious stupidness:

If you go thru the code source for the wpasuplicant (what I did trying to 
fix the bug), you can see that (at least that's true for FreeBSD 6.3) the 
wpasupplicant *only* supports the BSD driver for wlan cards and no other.

That is ok, if the documentation clearly would mention that.

However, it is completely misleading (and shows the ignorance on that 
subject by Paul) even pretending FreeBSD's wpasuplicant can be used with 
the driver option.

In fact, FreeBSD's wpasupplicant implementation is at best half baked.
It turned out, that one has to consider at least two different ndis drivers:

1. The generic one, which works for unencrypted and WEP connections (using 
the chipset's internal de/encryption facilities).
2. A specific ndis driver different from (1.) used to talk to the wlan 
adapter while encryption and authentication is done by wpasupplicant.

Since (2.) is missing, wpasupplicant tries to use the build-in BSD driver, 
which of course fails with the error message mentioned in my bug report.

In order to follow up this subject, I would recommend to change the 
category of the bug into something like 'documentation bug' straighten up 
the docs and close it.

I'm inclined to set up a wpa reference page with a detailed description of 
this issue and perhaps include some additional patches (wpasupplicant 
latest version for FreeBSD and others). However, currently I'm busy with 
other projects; so it is likely that this will we postponed after the 
summer term.

Further, it would be great (and maybe I ask one of my students) to get the 
ndis driver working for FreeBSD. But again: This will not happen until the 
winter term.

regards.
--eh.