NetworkManager does not play nicely with Cisco wireless APs due to wme_ie being broadcast instead of rsn_ie and/or wma_ie

Binary package hint: network-manager

My university's wireless access points are set to output Cisco-proprietary configuration information in their beacon packets, namely "wme_ie". They *should* be outputting RSN IE or WPA IE instead, but there's not much I can do about that aside from begging and pleading with my university not to continue to be jerks to the non-Windows-using community.

The Ubuntu side, however, can do something about it. Attached is the iwlist scan output from each of my wireless cards (dwl-g650 and ipw2100). You can plainly see a properly configged WPA AP and then the UI-Wireless-WEP WPA which has an Extra string.

The solution is to do one or both of the following:

   1) Have network-manager look for the wme_ie and understand it

   2) Have the wireless card drivers convert wme_ie to rsn/wpa ie

The problem with 1 is that my ipw2100 card does not pass ANY IE up to the higher layers (at least, it's not reported in iwlist). The madwifi-ng card, on the other hand, passes this information on to NetworkManager, which doesn't know what to do with it.

SYMPTOMS:
  The WPA network is not detected as such. Consequently, when clicking on the network in the GNOME NetworkManager applet, you are only presented with two options for security: WEP and open.