Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 130771
iwconfig/iwlist shows ap mac address incorrectly
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:47 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040803 Firefox/0.9.3 Description of problem: iwlist and iwconifg shows ap's mac address off by one. The ap's mac address is 00:A0:F8:5A:B3:E2 and iwlist/iwconfig will show mac address as 00:A0:F8:5A:B3:E3 for all ap's. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): wireless-tools-26-4 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.iwlist ath0 ap 2. 3. Actual Results: 00:A0:F8:5A:B3:E3 : Quality:11/94 Signal level:-84 dBm Noise level:-95 dBm (updated) Expected Results: 00:A0:F8:5A:B3:E2 : Quality:11/94 Signal level:-84 dBm Noise level:-95 dBm (updated) Additional info:
Does this persist in FC3?
Fedora Core 2 is now maintained by the Fedora Legacy project for security updates only. If this problem is a security issue, please reopen and reassign to the Fedora Legacy product. If it is not a security issue and hasn't been resolved in the current FC3 updates or in the FC4 test release, reopen and change the version to match.
FC3 has the same issue.
Confirmed issue is most likely due to wireless-tools, as all of ipw, atmel, and atheros drivers exhibit MAC address off-by-one error.
Ok, this is actually NOTABUG... From Jean Tourrilhes, wireless tools author: --------------------------------------- I guess you are talking of the "Access Point:" field displayed by iwconfig ? Well, this is not the MAC address of the Access Point, but the BSSID of the cell. The BSSID of the Cell in managed mode is derived from the MAC address of Access Point. For old Access Points, it was exactly the MAC address. Nowadays, the trend seems to use the MAC address, and set the Locally Administred bit (2nd lowest bit of the first byte). So, it is the BSSID Address of the AP, not its MAC Address. I think both the driver and the tools are reporting the proper address. Using kismet would confirm that. The BSSID Address is what make sense, because this is what is used by 802.11 management and if you try to associate to a specific AP, you do it by specifying its BSSID Address. Maybe the documentation needs to be clearer... -------------------------------