Not able to roam on FT-SAE network

Not able to roam on FT-SAE network

[Michael Yartys]

Hi

I've been running an FT-SAE network for quite some time now, and I've long noticed that my both my laptops with Intel 7260AC cards are unable to roam from one AP to another. When I move the laptops to an area with poor signal strength the background scanning of NetworkManager/hostapd is triggered as expected and a roam appears to be initiated, but instead of successfully roaming to the other AP with better signal strength it ends up returning to the current AP. This keeps on happening until I either manually disable and re-enable wifi, or if I move back to an area where the current AP has good signal strength. The laptops are running the following distros, kernels and wpa_supplicant versions:

-- Laptop 1 --
* Fedora 34
* 5.13.8-200
* wpa_supplicant v2.9

-- Laptop 2 --
* Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS
* 5.11.0-25
* wpa_supplicant v2.10-devel-hostap_2_9-2285-gc3155a725 (recent snapshot)

I can provide relevant logs from wpa_supplicant and the APs to developers personally.

Michael

Re: Not able to roam on FT-SAE network

[Michael Yartys]

Hi

I did a packet capture and I found out that what happens is that the client attempts to authenticate with fast transition, but the AP rejects the request due to an invalid PMKID. What's interesting is that my iPad causes the same behaviour, which might indicate that the problem lies with hostapd rather than the client implementations. I'll post this on the hostapd mailing list as well.

Michael

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

On Tuesday, August 10th, 2021 at 21:59, Michael Yartys <michael.yartys@protonmail.com> wrote:

> Hi
>
> I've been running an FT-SAE network for quite some time now, and I've long noticed that my both my laptops with Intel 7260AC cards are unable to roam from one AP to another. When I move the laptops to an area with poor signal strength the background scanning of NetworkManager/hostapd is triggered as expected and a roam appears to be initiated, but instead of successfully roaming to the other AP with better signal strength it ends up returning to the current AP. This keeps on happening until I either manually disable and re-enable wifi, or if I move back to an area where the current AP has good signal strength. The laptops are running the following distros, kernels and wpa_supplicant versions:
>
> -- Laptop 1 --
>
> -   Fedora 34
> -   5.13.8-200
> -   wpa_supplicant v2.9
>
>     -- Laptop 2 --
> -   Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS
> -   5.11.0-25
> -   wpa_supplicant v2.10-devel-hostap_2_9-2285-gc3155a725 (recent snapshot)
>
>     I can provide relevant logs from wpa_supplicant and the APs to developers personally.
>
>     Michael