Recent fragility with if_wi, 802.11 adhoc/wep, and Tiger
Sam Leffler
sam at errno.com
Wed Jul 20 14:44:46 GMT 2005
Michal Mertl wrote:
> Sam Leffler wrote:
>
>>Michal Mertl wrote:
>>
>>>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 routinely bridge ath cards (a wide variety) with bge using bridge and
>>see no problems. I get ~36 Mb/s in 11a w/ superg features and ~28 Mb/s
>>w/ basic stuff (what you find in RELENG_6). ping times are what you'd
>>expect (<1ms).
>
>
> I'm sorry, I was too brief in the description of the problem. It's the
> bridging on the card which works slow.
>
> 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.
Sam
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