Re: applet and wireless scan

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Wed, 2007-03-07 at 20:25 +0100, yelo_3 wrote:
> you told me that I should wait 10 seconds before
> having an updated list. for me it is a great thing! is
> the list updated even if it is open or should I close
> and reopen it? is this feature in 0.7 or already in
> 0.6.x?

NM scans every 20 seconds, and backs off to 2 minutes.  If you pull down
the menu, NM starts at 20 seconds again and backs off from there.

> why iwlist eth1 scan is so quick? is it inaccurate?

Because it blocks waiting for the scan results.  It is also highly
driver dependent.  Some drivers take up to 10 seconds to scan.

> and definitely I cannot understand why ghost APs are
> kept for 6 minutes... this is quite confusing!

Because a single wireless scan, even with an ipw2200, will never give
you a _complete_ picture of the wireless environment.  Radio is
inherently unreliable.  Your card may fail to receive the beacon for an
AP correctly, it may have collided with other traffic, etc.  The only
reliable way to get a more complete picture of your radio environment is
to do multiple scans and compile the results.

> especially in my case they are not purged if wireless
> is off

rfkill isn't well supported under linux at the moment, and it's not
reported to NetworkManager right now.  That's being worked on.

Dan