Re: Atheros abg / madwifi trouble

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Mon, 2005-01-31 at 13:08 -0500, Sven wrote:
> 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...

Unless we're displaying the MAC address too (which we're not going to
do) it doesn't really make any sense to show multiple access points in
the menu.  In the future, I hope to be able to pick a certain access
point based on signal strength, or at least fix card drivers to be able
to correctly roam to different access points in the same ESSID.  Some
drivers have private ioctl()s to be able to do that but AFAIK almost all
cards support that capability.

The problem with specifying a particular MAC address to associate with
is that the card can't roam and is locked to that MAC until we change
it.  Which would be OK, except that scanned quality information is even
worse than associated AP quality information.  Some drivers (atmel,
ipw2100) don't even return quality information for scanned access
points, and other drivers give totally different and inconsistent
quality levels for scanned access points in relation to the
noise/max_quality levels they advertise (for example, the currently
associated AP's quality information returned by SIOCGIWSTATS is
completely different than the quality information _for that same AP_ as
returned in the scan list).

In short, drivers really need to be fixed.

Dan