Re: Atheros abg / madwifi trouble

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Mon, 2005-01-31 at 11:46 -0500, Sven wrote:
> 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? 

I just checked with wavemon and my Atheros a/b/g card...  I also see the
list of access points changing, but the code that does that uses the
SIOCGIWAPLIST ioctl() which is deprecated and not very well supported
(only Atheros/madwifi seems to support it at all, none of the kernel
drivers do).  It seems to be more of a "passive" function that just
pulls the card's current list of access points without actually
triggering a scan.  I would expect this function to get removed from
Madwifi at some point.  Just the fact that none of the in-kernel drivers
support SIOCGIWAPLIST means we cannot use it and that we must use
SIOCGIWSCAN.  There are a number of reasons for that, first that WAPLIST
had hard limits on the attributes for each AP returned by the call, it
had an upper limit of access points returned too.

In short, wavemon is using a deprecated API that is only supported by
the madwifi drivers and will be removed in the future AFAIK.

> 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.

I think we can address your problem by having the card scan less often
(and even less often if its an a/b/g card).

Dan