Re: Recent fragility with if_wi, 802.11 adhoc/wep, and Tiger

Michal Mertl wrote:
> Sam Leffler wrote:
> > Michal Mertl wrote:
> > > 
> > > I run an ath card in hostap mode and several wireless clients connect to
> > > it and are on the same IP network. The ping from one client to another
> > > is slow yet both ping the AP fine. I think that in this situation the
> > > bridging is done by ath (in HAL?) and configured by 'ifconfig apbridge'.
> > 
> > The bridging is done in the net80211 layer, not "in the card".  I will 
> > test, thank you.
> 
> Thanks for the correction.
> 
> And thank you for looking into it.

Some new findings:

I can confirm that the atheros based client really connects much worse
than an IPW based one. When I restart the atheros AP, the ipw card
connects immediately after the AP is back but the atheros client either
never connects or it will take long time (I didn't wait long enough). It
connects immediately after I issue ifconfig down/up on it.

More interesting finding that I have is about the bridging issue. I
wasn't able to find which debug setting (via dev.ath.0.debug or
net.wlan.0.debug) will show me any usefull information. Anyways it now
seems to me that I was wrong saying that it works at all. The AP bridges
the packets only when there is another IP communication between the AP
host and one of the clients. It seems to me that the bridged packets are
queued somewhere and sent only when there are some non bridged.

Test conditions - I have 192.168.1.1 on the AP, .2 on the IPW notebook
and .3 on the atheros client. The settings of ath0 on AP are: "mode 11b
mediaopt hostap channel 1 ssid test_ap_xx". The settings on clients are
almost the same except there I don't issue any mediaopt. I hope I'm not
doing anything extra stupid :-). The nodes are just several centimeters
apart from each other and I only have tiny antennas. When the only IP
communication is the ping from 192.168.1.2 to .3 (between the clients) I
don't get any answer. When I ping at the same time from between any of
the clients and the AP it works. When I let the first ping run for
several seconds and then start the second one I get all the answers at
the same time.

This is probably complete nonsense but I think that what I'm
experiencing looks as if the bridged packets weren't generating
interrupts or something.

I've got serial consoles hooked to the machines and am able to sprinkle
some debug prints somewhere if required.


Michal