I run Linux 2.6.26 on my home router, which provides DHCP to other
machines. It doesn't itself have wifi, instead I have an access point
plugged into the switch on the `inside the NAT' side of the router. The
WAP's configured to just pass packets, not run its own DHCP server; it
just passes wireless clients' BOOTP and DHCP requests and the router's
replies.
Except, we have a Windows XP laptop which is managing to connect to the
wireless network but fails to get an IP address. At the router I see the
laptop just broadcasting the same kind of packet, over and over.
wireshark calls them "Internetwork Datagram Protocol" and tcpdump shows
them as,
18:39:16.040845 00:16:cf:3f:44:82 (oui Unknown) > Broadcast, ethertype NS (0x0600), length 60:
0x0000: 0000 f581 8000 0000 f581 8000 0001 0014 ................
0x0010: d131 4421 ac13 fa10 ac13 fa13 ac13 ac13 .1D!............
0x0020: fa13 ac13 fa13 6012 2000 30f1 0000 ......`...0...
What /is/ that? Is it actually a DHCP request by some other name that my
router is wrongly ignoring, or is XP resorting to some alien weirdness I
can talk it out of? It doesn't send any other packets, just these. The
XP laptop can connect on a neighbor's wifi just fine. (And my Linux
laptops can connect wirelessly to my home network just fine.)
I ask here partly because my diagnostic stuff on the router is all under
Linux, and I wonder if it's actually the router's fault as some
different manifestation of a bug like the one at,
http://www.mail-archive.com/zd1211-d.../msg01465.html
Okay, that bug was in ieee80211, which is code the router isn't even
using, partly because it doesn't have wireless itself. But has this kind
of bug been observed in wired networking on recent kernels? Or is it
possible that the problem is this very bug and that the access point, a
Trendnet TEW-450APB, is running Linux under the hood?
Anyhow, I feel rather out of my depth; I wondered if somebody else had
seen this before and already done the hard work of diagnosing it!
Mark
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