Re: FC5 NM/Madwifi "roaming" loses IP Address

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Wed, 2006-07-12 at 09:09 -0400, Derek Atkins wrote:
> Quoting Robert Love <rml novell com>:
> 
> > On Tue, 2006-07-11 at 15:05 -0400, Derek Atkins wrote:
> >
> >> I'm sitting here in Montr� at the IETF and noticed a really
> >> annoying problem.  When I wander from one room to another
> >> I have to roam from one AP to another, and NM seems to disconnect
> >> the network.  When I arrive at the other room I have to manually
> >> re-select the network and when it comes back up it's forgotten my
> >> DHCP lease and gets me a new IP Address.
> >
> > Actually, I think Madwifi has a bug where it cannot roam.  Instead of
> > silently roaming to a new AP (a process that does not involve NM), the
> > driver loses association.
> 
> Well, it would be nice if that bug were fixed...  But it doesn't answer
> the question of why, when I come back up, do I get a new IP Address from
> DHCP?  It's almost as if NM/dhclient don't know that it can just make
> a DHCP_REQUEST and instead always falls back to a DHCP_DISCOVER.  This
> is true even if the Network Name (ESSID) hasn't changed!  *THIS* I consider
> a bug in NM.

Well, I think that what should be done here is to try to get dhclient to
do a DHCP renew when we notice an AP change, as long as that AP is in
the same cached BSSID list as the old AP, rather than doing a request
from the start.  That's a bit complicated I guess, but it would be more
ideal than the current situation.

Dan