Re: Still roaming issues with new dhclient and if_wi

Kevin Oberman wrote:
> I have a ThinkPad with a Prism2.5 wireless card and use the wi
> driver. Since the change to the OpenBSD dhclient I am no longer able to
> roam from our conference room to my office. Before the dhclient change,
> I would lose association as I walked up two floors and from one end of
> the building to the other, associate again in my office (or while
> walking down the corridor) and, after a short wait for the bridge to
> figure out where my MAC was coming from and update its forwarding
> tables, I was up and running including my ssh sessions.
> 
> I previously complained that dhclient was exiting when the card lost
> association and had to be restarted. That's been fixed (Thanks, Sam),
> but the problem is now even more annoying. I now get to my office and
> dhclient is still running and the interface is associated, but the
> interface no longer has an IP address. It is possible that it would
> eventually get one, but I have never been willing to wait for more than
> a few minutes. I can "fix" it by killing dhclient and re-starting it. I
> get an address (same one I had in the conference room) immediately and
> I'm back to normal.
> 
> I think the issue is that the SSID changes between my office and the
> conference room. lbnl_wlan45 in the conf. room and lbnl_wlan46 in my
> office, but if dhclient lives on, why doesn't it request an IP when the
> SSID changes or simply exit? If I forget to kick it immediately, I lose
> my ssh sessions.

The issue is that the wi driver bypasses the net80211 state machine so 
when there's a reassociation dhclient isn't notified.  I was working 
with someone to try and resolve this but hit problems.  It may be 
possible to kludge this by having the driver do the notification 
directly instead of calling into net80211 to have it do it.

> 
> Don't you get tired of hearing that "it used to work with the old
> dhclient"? :-)
> 
> Any suggestions?

I don't get tired of hearing complaints.  I'll see what I can do to look 
at this but don't wait for me....

	Sam