Re: applet and wireless scan

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Thu, 2007-03-08 at 15:17 +0000, yelo_3 wrote:
> > "quality" is a subjective value that usually includes things like TX
> > retries, decryption errors, and other connection information in addition
> > to signal strength.  You can have a fairly high signal-to-noise ratio
> > but still have an overloaded radio channel with lots of collisions,
> > which means your transfer rates and latencies will be a lot worse than a
> > less-heavily loaded channel with a lower SNR.
> 
> so why does the applet refer to quality (which is a subjective value as you told me) and nothing else? I'm thinking of an unexperienced user that sees the bar at 30%, but doesn't get his connection up... He would surely think that nm is not a good product... Moreover no messages are shown to tell him that the noise is too heavy to bring the connection up

That's almost certainly a driver issue.  If the driver is saying that
quality of the AP is 30%, but you cannot connect, then the driver is
wrong.  The driver should be factoring all necessary information into
the "quality" measurement.

> > I'd like to avoid cramming too much functionality into the applet
> > itself.  NM exports a D-Bus API that any program can use to query and
> > set network status.  More specific uses should probably have separate
> > tools to do what they want rather than extending the applet.
> 
> But in this way the user always sees old scan results! the ones from the previous click! I really think that this is an issue... I would prefer for instance that when I click a 5-10 seconds scan is done before popping up the list with a "scanning" libnotify message with timeout, to inform the user that those seconds are not wasted.

An issue here is that a scan is technically a DoS on the card.  If you
have an existing connection, you should not be able to repeatedly
trigger scans.  So no matter what, you should never be able to
immediately trigger more than one scan if you are not root.

Dan

> Anyway again. In my nm the scan is not done when I click on the applet, the only way to have updated results is to wait for that too long 2 minutes!
> I'm using ubuntu feisty, network-manager 0.6.4
> 
> Thank you Dan.
> 
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