Re: forcing 802.11a association

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Mon, 2007-06-25 at 12:23 -0400, Derek Atkins wrote:
> Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com> writes:
> 
> >> > 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?
> 
> Like I said, "the BSSID is the same on both (a) and (b/g)", so, yes,
> my AP (a D-Link) has the same BSSID/MAC on both bands.  I do not
> believe there is any way for me to change this.  In fact, it uses
> the same BSSID/MAC on ALL three "interfaces" (802.3, 802.11a, and 802.11b/g)

Whee.  So drivers internally now have to differentiate a specific access
point based on the (band, BSSID, SSID) tuple, which I'm pretty sure not
many do.

Dan