Long authentication times

[Stefan Winter]

Good evening,

> Good morning to all, I am coordinating a project for installing a
> wireless network at the Faculty of Statistics of University of Rome.
> We have been using freeradius with PEAP and EAP-TTLS enabled. All
> seems to work fine except for the very long authentication times
> (about one minutes) we are experiencing when using the default Windows
> XP supplicant.
>
> After doing some searches on the previous discussions, I found the
> following thread where it is said that such a problem may be due to
> the way the Windows supplicant handles the EAP negotiation:
>
> http://www.mail-archive.com/freeradius-users@lists.freeradius.org/msg30473.
>html
>
> I performed some further searches and discovered that this delay may
> be due to the four-way handshake protocol used by the client machine
> to establish a new connection with the AP. Do someone knows if there
> exists any tuning in the implementation of this protocol able to
> reduce the waiting time?
>
> Thanks in advance for any help!

I haven't done any extensive research, but my bundled Intel PRO/Wireless 
supplicant (comes with Centrino chipsets) gets it done within a few seconds. 
I believe that the time of issuing the DHCP request after authentication is 
quite crucial. If it is triggered too early, you hang around in an 
authenticated-but-not-ready state until the DHCP request times out and is 
tried again.

Greetings,

Stefan

-- 
Stefan WINTER

Stiftung RESTENA - Réseau Téléinformatique de l'Education Nationale et de 
la Recherche
Ingenieur Forschung & Entwicklung

6, rue Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi
L-1359 Luxembourg
E-Mail: stefan.winter at restena.lu     Tel.:     +352 424409-1
http://www.restena.lu                Fax:      +352 422473
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