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

[Michal Mertl]

Robert Watson wrote:
> I fairly regularly use 802.11 adhoc with WEP to communicate between my 
> 6.x/7.x FreeBSD notebook using if_wi, and my Apple PowerBook running Mac 
> OS X Tiger.  A few days ago, when I updated from a June to a July HEAD 
> revision, this became quite "fragile".  Specifically, I often find that 
> the Mac can't send to the FreeBSD box (ARP fails, etc), and that sometimes 
> it will give an error when I ask it to re-connect to the ad hoc network. 
> I find that if I ifconfig down/up if_wi, and likewise turn off and on the 
> wireless on the PowerBook, it seems to recover.  I've not had a chance to 
> really try and diagnose this at all -- i.e., does tcpdump show packets on 
> either end, 802.11 state machine, etc.  I was wondering if anyone else has 
> seen this problem, though.

Yes, I'm also experiencing similar problems. The problems seem to happen
also with different wireless cards and without wep. They were reported
by Johann Hugo on 14th in an email titled "ath hostap - clients
assosiated, but no comms" too.

Another problem with WiFi which Johann reported long time ago is that
bridging on atheros (only?) AP works really bad. I get very varying ping
response (50 - inf. ms). Sometimes it seems the packets get queued
somewhere - after some time I receive several replies at once.

I tried to debug it a little but didn't get anywhere. I will try some
more.

Michal