Re: [REQ] Adding support for simultaneous wireless networks

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Mon, 2008-10-27 at 00:53 -0600, Brent Newland wrote:
> I work at a retail store selling computers, and I can tell you that all the printer manufacturer's seem to be going wireless. Out of the latest selection of HP and Canon printers we carry, nearly all of the consumer level machines have built in wireless.
> 
> Alot of people expect to be able to connect to the internet (whether it's through a wireless network, a cell phone card, a cable) and also be able to connect to their printer at the same time to print wirelessly, but that's not currently an easy thing to configure.
> 
> What's even worse is if you want to connect to a wireless network while being connected to a wireless printer in ad-hoc mode. Currently, to do this you would have to use airtun-ng (this is the only program I've found which does this):
> http://www.aircrack-ng.org/doku.php?id=airtun-ng&DokuWiki=70b54c7d04564ca6bcee0f8746f3044d#connecting_to_two_access_points
> 
> That'll let you connect to two wireless networks as long as they are on the same channel.

This would be nice to have, and some drivers in Linux can do this, but
it's highly dependent on the hardware and the driver situation at the
moment.  I don't think we can turn it on for a while.  There would also
need to be quite a bit of UI work going in because most people don't
really care or know that you can't have one card operate on multiple
channels at the same time (without major performance loss at least).
Thus, the UI would have to be designed in such a way that you get
alerted that you are about to break the connection to one resource if
you try to switch to another resource on a different channel.

Dan