Re: NM limitations!?

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Mon, 2006-10-09 at 13:30 -0400, Jeff Schallenberg wrote:
> I managed to install Network Manager on Ubuntu, and it works fine with
> my NetGear WG511T AR5212 802.11abg NIC.
> 
> But it is not displaying information the way I think it should. 
> 
> I have three access points in my home network - a wireless router and
> two repeaters. All have the same SSID, same channel, but different MAC
> addresses and different signal strengths. I wish NM would display all
> three, along with their MAC addresses. 

Why would you not want NM to connect to the strongest one?  Roaming is
actually a hard problem to deal with.  At what signal threshold do you
roam to a new AP in the same SSID?

Furthermore, we don't do this because signal strength reporting from
linux drivers in scan results is still crap and completely unreliable.

> The same thing applies when I am  out connecting to hotspots on the
> road. There are often multiple hotspots distinguished only by their
> MAC adresses. I would like to select among them.

Are they the same SSID?  If so, are they run by different providers?  If
so, that's completely broken and out of spec.  But maybe we need to
handle it somehow.

> Is there a way of configuring what information NM displays? If not,
> could this information be added (optionally, perhaps) in a future
> update? 

Not at this time.  It's a tradeoff between presenting the user with a
huge, huge list of every access point around (which few people care
about), and collapsing that list into access points grouped by SSID.

In reality, the SSID is _supposed_ to be a unique identifier of _one_
organizations network, and they are all supposed to be connected
underneath such that if I roam from one to the next, I can keep my IP
address and my open network connections.

That's not entirely true in the world though, given unencrypted access
points all called 'linksys'.  We've tried to deal with this through
caching the BSSIDs of known access points, but that's not a complete
solution.  There is utility to specifying a list of acceptable BSSIDs to
connect to _within_ a certain SSID, but I don't really see a case for
showing every BSSID that exists....

Dan

> -- 
> - Jeff 
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