Re: forcing 802.11a association

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Mon, 2007-06-25 at 11:15 -0400, Derek Atkins wrote:
> Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com> writes:
> 
> > On Sun, 2007-06-24 at 18:21 +0200, Mathieu GELI wrote:
> >> Hi list,
> >> 
> >> I'm wondering wheter it is possible to force association on the 5Ghz band
> >> when a hostpot provides both 2.4 & 5 even if on 2.4 the driver reports
> >> a quality a little bit bigger.
> >
> > Not with 0.6.x, unfortunately.  0.7 will allow you to specify a
> > particular band for a specific Connection.
> >
> >> I doubt NM does even see the 5Ghz channels.
> >> The card is an Intel PRO Wireless 3945ABG
> >
> > It will see the channels, but if you have the same SSID on both bands,
> > it's completely up to wpa_supplicant and the driver itself what band it
> > decides to use for the association, since NM doesn't pass the channel.
> > I'd guess that the card just reports scan results for the b/g band
> > first, and therefore that's the BSSID that wpa_supplicant picks.
> >
> > Dan
> 
> I've noticed that the iwl3945 driver doesn't even report the (a) band
> results when the BSSID is the same on both (a) and (b/g).

That seems quite wrong from a driver point of view; it shouldn't be
coalescing the networks that aggressively internally.  Unless, of
course, the A band radio and the B/G band radio of a specific AP have
the same BSSID/MAC address... do they for you?

Dan