Problems running ath with bgscan enabled

[Kevin Oberman]

> Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2007 19:38:56 -0700
> From: Sam Leffler <sam at errno.com>
> Sender: owner-freebsd-mobile at freebsd.org
> 
> AT Matik wrote:
> > On Saturday 20 October 2007 22:30:32 Kevin Oberman wrote:
> >   
> >> My bgscan interval was the default 300 and almost every 5 minutes I
> >> would lose connectivity, often for over a minute. When I made the
> >> association between the bgscan interval and the drop-outs, I did an
> >> "ifconfig ath0 -bgscan" and things stabilized immediately. No further
> >> problems.
> >>
> >> ath_hal: 0.9.20.3 (AR5210, AR5211, AR5212, RF5111, RF5112, RF2413, RF5413)
> >> ath0: <Atheros 5212> mem 0xb4000000-0xb400ffff irq 11 at device 2.0 on
> >> pci11 ath0: mac 5.9 phy 4.3 radio 3.6
> >>
> >> This is really not acceptable for default behavior as it won't be clear
> >> to many how to fix it. Is it expected or is something wrong?
> >>
> >>     
> >
> > I believe it is so but as you already did, when you like to associate only to 
> > the AP of your wpa config you should set -bgscan and eventually 'roaming 
> > manual' also, if I am not wrong this is described in ifconfig's manpage
> >
> >   
> 
> wpa_supplicant works fine w/ bgscan.  When the bgscan's complete 
> wpa_supplicant receives an event and retrieves the scan results.  It 
> then decides whether or not to roam.  There is no need to manually 
> configure the device.
> 
> OTOH the scanning+roaming code in wpa_supplicant is very simplistic and 
> I don't have a lot of experience with how well it does roaming.  I 
> believe it will only join ap's that are listed in the config file so it 
> shouldn't roam arbitrarily.  Without a log it's virtually impossible to 
> comment on reports/complaints.  And even w/ a wpa_supplicant log it's 
> also useful to understand if there are other events that trigger 
> scanning and/or roaming--like beacon miss events.  Hence the need for 
> logs and statistics.

Exactly what statistics should I be collecting? I am assuming scan, but
is there anything else? assoc? Or is there some other statistic you need?
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634
Key fingerprint:059B 2DDF 031C 9BA3 14A4  EADA 927D EBB3 987B 3751
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