Selective scanning solution

[Tony Espy]

Jouni Malinen wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 28, 2005 at 07:17:36PM -0500, Tony Espy wrote: 
> 
>>This last paragraph is a bit of a surprise to me.  I've actually made 
>>some modifications to wpa_supplicant to allow another process to ask it 
>>to scan and/or associate via the control socket.  I haven't seen a 
>>problem with the connection dropping when this is done.
> 
> Which firmware version are you using? I'm testing with STA f/w v1.8.3
> and it ended up in odd state where all TX packets are being dropped if I
> do a scan request in host_roaming=2 mode.

We're mostly using STA f/w v1.8.3, although some of our pads are running 
v1.7.4.  The PRI f/w is a mix of v1.1.0 and v1.1.1.

FYI, I'm only doing BROADCAST scans, never for a single SSID.

>>p.s. I haven't made my wpa_supplicant changes available as I intend to 
>>port them to 0.3.7 first, however if you ( or anyone else ) are 
>>interested in seeing them please let me know.
> 
> In generel, I would suggest the "release early, release often" mantra
> often used with Linux development. I don't have a fixed plan on when
> something like this would happen, but improvements on this area are
> certainly on my to-do list for wpa_supplicant.. In other words, there
> are risks of doing double work here.

Point taken.  I've only really been working with Linux for about 9 
months or so ( and HostAP / wpa_supplicant for about 5 months ).

I definately need to port my changes to your latest stable release 
before publishing them.  It's on my to-do list.  I've been fighting 
hardware lockup problems ( most likely our hardware bug ), signal 
quality problems and most recently problems with our DHCP client that 
all need to be fixed before we can ship... so these have to come first.

By the way, in addition to the scan and associate requests over the 
control socket, I also had to switch the control socket from Unix Domain 
sockets to Inet sockets so I could talk to the socket from Java ( which 
lacks UD socket support ).  This might also be something you'd want to 
incorporate as a config option.

Also, did you see my note re: use of both wifi0 and wlan0 in Managed 
mode?  I want to push ahead with this idea, but I'm not sure this is a 
valid use of HostAP's devices.

thanks,
Tony Espy
Pepper Computer