Re: WiFi: Problem with Entreprise networks (with multiple routers)

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Mon, 2013-10-14 at 18:39 +0200, Matthieu Baerts wrote:
> Hello Dan and thank you for this answer,
>
> On Mon, 2013-10-14 at 09:41 -0500, Dan Williams wrote:
> > This problem is most definitely a supplicant issue.  The supplicant
> > roams too aggressively, even if the currently associated access point
> > has a very good signal.  We've patched that in Fedora, but as you
> > indicate, your kernel wifi driver is also not working correctly when
> > reporting signal strength.
>
> Thank you for these details!
> Do you know if it's possible to configure wpa_supplicant (via NM or not)
> to be less aggressive but without having to patch it? (or to force it to
> not switch between access points?).
>
> I know that we can force wpa_supplication to try to connect to a
> specific access point (by using the mac address) but it's not what I
> want: I don't want to change the settings each time I want to connect to
> a different access point of this network.

Correct, you want to keep roaming enabled, and that's not possible
(obviously) when locking to a specific access point.  There a few things
that will make this better:

1) Apply the following patch to your wpa_supplicant, which will make the
problem much better but
http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/wpa_supplicant.git/tree/rh837402-less-aggressive-roaming.patch

2) Apply the following commit to your NetworkManager packages, which
requests that the supplicant scan for roaming a little less often:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/commit/?id=dd9cf657ef1f9d5909dad2eb697098715325fecf

3) Wait for some upstream changes to the supplicant, which will include
*some* form of the above patch, as well as one I posted upstream to
request the supplicant not to roam as a result of an information-only
scan that NetworkManager periodically does.

Obviously all these fixes depend on the kernel driver also reporting the
signal strength correctly...

Dan