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

[Sam Leffler]

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.

You didn't provide any config info.  I recently noticed the wi driver 
isn't hooked up properly to the net80211 layer causing link state events 
to not be done properly (it appears disassoc events were being generated 
but not assoc/reassoc events).  If you're using dhclient+adhoc mode then 
this might be related.

	Sam