Re: applet and wireless scan

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Wed, 2007-03-07 at 09:25 -0500, Yaakov Nemoy wrote:
> On 3/6/07, Darren Albers <dalbers gmail com> wrote:
> > On 3/6/07, yelo_3 <yelo_3 yahoo it> wrote:
> > > I know that nm-applet shows the result of scans every
> > > 2 minutes. I think that this was discussed lots of
> > > times. I just wanted to ask a question.
> > > why it is not acceptable to do scans also every time I
> > > left-click on the applet, to show updated results?
> > > Or at least add a "refresh list" button... this is
> > > really helpful to preserve time!
> >
> > That is what happens if I recall correctly, when you drop down the
> > list it initiates a scan request.
> 
> That seems strange to me as well, the only time I can get it to scan
> correctly is to open swscanner (which picks up a massive number of
> networks compared to network-manager)

NM coalesces networks of the same SSID into one entry in it's scan
table.  It doesn't not break out by BSSID, but we may do that for 0.7
and rely on the user tools (like the applets) to perform the coalescing
themselves.  Usually, NM's list is longer than the wireless card's list
because the card culls APs more frequently than NM.  NM keeps a
composite list of a couple scans and removes SSIDs from the list after 6
minutes have passed, I think.

This leads to interesting situations on trains where cards like the
ipw2x00 which do background scanning report every AP they see in a
constant stream, and NM only removes them every 6 minutes.  But that's a
side-effect and somewhat fixable.

Dan