Re: No inter-AP Roaming?

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Tue, 2007-12-04 at 15:31 -0500, Derek Atkins wrote:
> I'm sitting at the IETF, connected to the 802.11 network..
> But as I wander from room to room, NM doesn't roam.  It wont
> jump from one AP to another as I move around the conference
> facility.  I'll get to my new room and find that I no longer
> have any network and then have to wait for a full connection
> sequence.
> 
> What gives?  I certainly don't have this problem if I just
> let the driver/hardware roam on its own.

Well, NM doesn't control roaming at all, wpa_supplicant and the driver
do.  Sometimes wpa_supplicant will push the BSSID down to the driver
when connecting (not entirely sure when that is) and if the driver
actually follows WEXT (which lots don't) that would cause the driver to
lock to that single BSSID and not switch.  That bit is highly driver
dependent.  It looks like wpa_supplicant will only do this when it has
previously timed out authentication with the station but tries again
(like it should).  It then passes the BSSID down to the association code
which tries to lock the card to that BSSID specifically.

Dan