Fwd: has anyone had a chance to look at my nm-applet patch?

["Katelin Ganzer" <katelin ganzer gmail com>]

On 10/28/07, Darren Albers <dalbers gmail com> wrote:
> I am not a dev but my first thought was "Great idea" but then I
> realized that it is probably way too much info for the user. In
> /most/ cases the user will see a large number of AP's and will pick
> the one with the best signal and this is what NM does now
> automatically.  I think it only confuses the issue for the user to see
> all the different channels.

I think this is only true if the network with the strongest signal is
one that the user actually has privileges to connect to, but that's
really not relevant.

>
> I can see three situations were you have multiple AP's broadcasting
> the same SSID:

My patch wasn't really meant to solve the problem of multiple APs
broadcasting the same ESSID. That application hadn't even occurred to
me...

> 1) Corporate environments:  In this case NM is going to connect to the
> one with the best signal strength automatically with no user
> intervention required so no need for it here.
> 2) Neighborhoods where everyone has an AP broadcasting out Linksys.
> The strongest AP /should/  be the users in most cases but the user
> really should rename that SSID!
> 3) Someone is in an airport, coffee shop, cafe etc.. and has setup a
> rogue AP with the same SSID to sniff someones sessions.   This patch
> won't help here since the user won't know which is the legit AP anyway
> (This is why I ALWAYS use VPN when I am on a public hotspot).
>
> So the only situation I can see it solving is #2 but that seems pretty
> narrow.  Is there another use that I am missing?

In my apartment, nearly everyone has their own wireless network, so I
see about 20-30 ESSIDs and obviously have a lot of channel/frequency
overlap which causes a lot of interference/general flakyness if my AP
is competing with other APs on the same channel with reasonably strong
signals. As you can imagine, it's useful to know what channels these
other networks are on so that I can adjust mine to be on an unused
channel far away from the more widely-used channels in order to
maximize the effectiveness of my own wireless network.

>
> Maybe it would be better to make this an option that can be enabled by
> changing a gconf value for advanced users who want to see this
> information but otherwise leave it disabled?  Out of curiosity how do
> other OS's deal with this?
>
> I love the idea of the patch and I always like seeing more information
> so if I had an option I would personally enable this feature but I
> don't think it should be the default.
>

I'm not opposed to making it a configurable option, although I have to
wonder if it wouldn't be better to avoid that, especially since I
don't know how to use gconf :)

I was thinking that if the developers are opposed to having the
channel displayed inside the progress bar, that maybe they would be
okay with displaying a nicely formatted tooltip with a bunch of useful
info?

For example, maybe something like:

<b>ESSID:</b> Katie's Network
<b>Address:</b> 00:19:5B:4C:F7:D1
<b>Protocols:</b> 802.11bg
<b>Frequency:</b> 2.437 GHz
<b>Channel:</b> 6
<b>Security:</b> None

I don't know what else might be considered useful, and I'm not
necessarily volunteering to go to the lengths of writing the code to
get/display all of that info, but it would at least be a convenient
place for other people to add more info that they'd like t see in th
future.

Of course, I've never actually implemented tooltips in Gtk before so
I'm not sure how to do it =)

Katie