Re: Atheros abg / madwifi trouble

[Sven <sr12 duke edu>]

On Mon, 2005-01-31 at 11:14 -0500, Dan Williams wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-01-31 at 10:37 -0500, Sven wrote:
> > > There are really just two things to consider.  We can't _never_ scan,
> > > and we can't always scan.  We need to find some algorithm for NM of
> > > balancing the two, and make that algorithm tunable on-the-fly.  We want
> > > to do a few scans on startup of course, to build the initial list.  And
> > > perhaps we want to scan more often when the card isn't in use or when
> > > its not associated, for example.
> > it seems to me that if the card is connected to an AP, it should not try to 
> > scan that much/often unless  the user wants it to.
> 
> We can't _stop_ scanning when we're successfully connected to an AP,
> otherwise we'll never get an up-to-date list of access points in our
> menu, but it can be far less often than we do it now.  I still think
> that if the normalized scan list changes, we need to bump the next scan
> up earlier as well, to ensure validity of the scan list.  The thing is,
> if the menu lists an access point that actually is no longer there, the
> user technically cannot connect to it, but its still in the menu.
> _Also_ not good from a users perspective.
> 
> At a future point we may be able to filter out access points that are at
> the edge of the card's range, but under Linux right now the drivers
> simply suck too much.  Its hard enough getting usable signal strength
> for the _current_ access point, let alone for scanned access points.

agreed. the drivers are not perfect, but usable. i'm annoyed by the fact
that my current madwifi driver does not display signal strengths in
iwlist scan. however, it seems to me that the card _is_ scanning for
changes in AP's constantly without disconnecting (ie, in wavemon i see
changes in the AP list, but no interruptions in the connection). i
assume that is driver specific? 

right now, i'm more or less happy using ifplugd and connecting to secure
networks by hand. it'd be great to have a wireless solution that works
in a user friendly way, though.

Sven