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Re: IETF58 - Network Status

2003-11-15 19:06:47
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Iljitsch van Beijnum" <iljitsch(_at_)muada(_dot_)com>

As for 2., it seems some stuff tries to hang on to the same base
station network when the base station in use disappears while other
implementations simply jump to the strongest network they can find,
even if this is a different SSID (when the SSID isn't explicitly
selected) or a peer to peer network using the same SSID.

I am not an 802.11 genius and am not trying to debug a LAN protocol I
understand vaguely on the IETF discussion list without looking at the
specs first, BUT this is approximately the behavior I thought I was
seeing, too - I happened to be running Network Stumbler, especially
Tuesday and Wednesday (just before the network hygiene signs were
taped to all the rest room doors, in a burst of fitting irony).

What I THOUGHT I was seeing was a heckuvalotta peer-to-peer
transmitters insisting they were ietf58, but (at least by the time I
noticed a problem and turned my attention to Network Stumbler) there
were also a pretty good collection of access points for ietf58 that
were reachable and active.

FWIW, if my (Dell TrueMobile) card had lost its mind and connected to
a different SSID based on signal strength, I would have expected to
see the Hilton network pop up at least once, and I never did, so I'd
be a tiny bit surprised if that was happening. It looks more like the
check was for strongest signal with same SSID, not including "is this
also an access point?" check.

Once that happened, of course, I was off into the land of link-local
addresses, etc.

Obviously it
would help if the clients improved their behavior, but wouldn't it
also
make sense for the base stations to simply not disappear? That would
also solve the problem.

I had a nice conversation with one of the university NOC chaps on
Friday morning, who said a lot of the access points came up
transmitting at 1 milliwatt, which was plenty until somebody walked
between you and the transmitter. This should have been fine (just find
another transmitter, right?), but the process kept stumbling over
adjacent machines already announcing ietf58 in ad hoc mode, and (like
all great networking phenomenon these days) the problem managed to
spread because when (if?) the new machine went into ietf58
peer-to-peer mode, it's now close to other machines, so the next time
someone interrupts their signal from the access point, they home on
you, and...

Sorry I don't remember the name - hope I said "thank you" then!

Spencer




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