Re: Unnecessary reconnects

[Derek Atkins <warlord MIT EDU>]

Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com> writes:

>> Maybe a timeout period could be lengthened or specified to give enough
>> time for wpa_supplicant to try to recover before restarting all the
>> services?
>
> That seems like a gross hack.  Is this the rekey interval?  Does it
> really take 15 seconds to rekey?   If so, are you at the margins of the
> network?  what's your configuration, WPA[2] Enterprise?  Because if this
> is a WPA-PSK connection, that's really wrong...  Also, what madwifi
> revision #?  Older ones are _known_ not to work well in some cases.

I've seen similar issues myself.  I'm wondering if (somewhere)
the "link down" events need to be debounced?  I seem to see an
ADDRCONF(NETDEV*) log message before NM pulls down my connections.
Again, if I turn off NM and just ifup the link on my own I never
see these disconnects.   It seems to happen more often when I'm
in an environment with multiple Access Points.

>> What triggers the disconnect in nm?  The CTRL-EVENT-DISCONNECTED message
>> from wpa_supplicant, or the inability to reach the gateway?
>
> wpa_supplicant sees the connection has been disconnected, and tells NM.
> NM starts a 6 or 10 second timer, and if the connect has not been
> brought back up after that time, it kills the connection.

The problem I see is that a quick "link timeout" pulls the whole
connection down, even if the situation is such that if you did NOTHING
it would all recover on its own.  I'm using madwifi-0.9.2 in case
it matters.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord MIT EDU                        PGP key available