Re: Atheros abg / madwifi trouble

[Sven <sr12 duke edu>]

On Mon, 2005-01-31 at 12:25 -0500, Dan Williams wrote:
> 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.
mhhh. too bad. i played with iwlist a bit (and, after downloading the madwifi sources and 
building a new driver i have even link qualities now) i noticed disassociation from the AP
when scanning, as you said. and iwlist ap only shows the AP's from previous scans... FWIW
i also noticed though that wavemon has the same output in aplst as iwlist ap. 

> 
> 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).
that would be great! automatic scanning is great, but not if it makes
the connection a pain... in the NM applet, could there be a user
friendly way to restrict the card to a,b or g only?

also, i noticed that in a network environment with many ap's with the
same essid NM only shows one entry in the wireless networks - should one
not be able to choose between the ap's if one wanted to? but that's just
a minor question on the side...

Sven