While debugging wireless/WPA/802.1x against
our Access Points, I found that there are bootup
issues in XP booting with the wireless NICs as
the only interface i.e. no wired connectivity
when they are using 802.1x/EAP/PEAP

Many a time, PEAP negotiations using user login
credentials fail because the RasMan/Remote
Access Connection Manager that hosts MSCHAPV2
authentication exits/aborts unexpectedly leaving
the authentication to time out at the AP side.
It does not seem to recover from this failure.

From looking at the "netsh ras..." tracing logs it
seems that RasMan terminates based on reference
counting mechanism. The mechanism may be flawed or
there is a race condition between it and the
EAP processing.

In any case I have found a way to keep this
problem from happening by keep RasMan alive -
enabling Application Layer Gateway and
Internet Connection Firewall - users of RasMan -
keeps the reference count up and prevents RasMan
from exiting prematurely.

Any one else seen problems with windows XP boot
when using wireless/802.1x? Any patches/updates
from Microsoft?

Thanks,

- Nehru

ps: If there is a another group which is more appropriate
for this post I'd appreciate it if you let me know.

Nehru,

While this is an approprate group, you might want to cross post this at
microsoft.public.windows.networking.wireless. I assume that you are using
WPA via KB 815485.

You might try to enable EAPOL and RASTLS tracing by setting (DWORDs) from
zero to one at HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Tracing\EAPOL\EnableFileTr acing and
...\RASTLS\EnableFileTracing. The logs will be in
%windir%\tracing\EAPOL.LOG and RASTLS.LOG.

Bryan S. Burgin
bburgin@microsoft.com

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.