WDS speed issues revisited

[Dave]

I think I may have found the issue and resolution...and it bums me out
because I have been bit by this before...;(

Some of my cards have STA FW of 1.5.6 and the rest have 1.4.9 or 1.3.6. I
never worried much about permanantly flashing them up to 1.5.6 because my
startup scripts do a ram upload at boot time....and I CAN talk WDS 4-ADDR
then...so I thought all was good.

On a hunch I used two cards that had 1.5.6 and did no ram upload on
bootup...once the first ping packet from AP1 hit AP2 both WDS speeds jumped
up from 2Mbps to 11Mbps and stayed there even after packets stopped.

I then tried a 1.5.6 card with no ram upload and a 1.4.9 card ram uploaded
to 1.5.6 on bootup...sure enough I could talk WDS 4-ADDR but the 1.4.9 card
was stuck at 2Mbps while the 1.5.6 card jumped to 11Mbps right away.

This has bitten me before when trying to get WDS-4 working previously...and
I should have remembered the issue.

Jouni (or anyone), what is the correct procedure to reinitialize a card
after a ram upload in order to take advantage of the features of the newer
FW. I have tried tonight to issue an "iwpriv wlan0 reset 2" thinking that
might do it but to no avail.

I have flashed 1.5.6 into two of my 1.4.9 cards and am not doing a ram
upload on bootup...and for the past 30 minutes I see 11Mbps on both
boxes....I will try some heavy data transfers and see if anything happens
but it is my guess that all will be ok.

Thanks again for all your assistance Jouni...you have been extremely
helpful....and patient. I will let you know how fixed rate control works as
soon as I get a couple radios a few miles apart where conditions should
cause normal rate control.


Thanks!

-Dave



> On Tue, Apr 08, 2003 at 07:23:52PM -0700, Dave wrote:
>
> > I physically set two hostap boxes on my workbench about 5 feet apart,
> > installed two brand new radios, rebuilt hostap from the latest release
and
> > installed/configured...no luck on a successful, stable 11Mbps WDS link.
>
> Which transmit rates are being used with the CVS version (i.e., the one
> that is supposed to fix Repeater mode rate control)? Do you see
> different rates being used or only one? I would be interested in seeing
> /proc/net/hostap/wlan0/<other end hwaddr> statistics for the link.
>
> If the other end does not ACK frames for some reason, rate control
> algorithm will most certainly drop the rate. If that is the case, I
> would like to find out why the ACKs are not sent.
>
> If you want to test hardcoding rate control, that should also be fixed
> now (althought complete untested ;-) for Repeater mode. 'iwconfig wlan0
> rate 11M fixed' should in theory allow only rate 11M being selected for
> TX rate.
>
> --
> Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA
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