wpa_supplicant over-eagerly blacklisting AP sending PREV_AUTH_NOT_VALID?

[Gareth McCaughan]

On 03/02/2016 12:12, Jouni Malinen wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 03, 2016 at 08:07:41AM +0000, Gareth McCaughan wrote:
>> Are any problems known or expected if I run wpa_supplicant 2.5
>> on a machine running Ubuntu 14.04? (I'm thinking that other
>> system components might have out-of-date expectations about
>> what wpa_supplicant will do.)
>
> That should work fine. I'm not aware of any specific issue for that
> combination and in general, there is requirement of maintaining
> backwards compatibility in supported wpa_supplicant interfaces.

So, after upgrading from 2.1 to 2.5 I can confirm that
the wireless problems we were experiencing are very much
improved (thanks, Jason!) and that nothing appears to
break in obvious ways as a result of running wpa_supplicant
2.5 on Ubuntu 14.04 (thanks, Jouni!).

But: Is this fix really the Right Thing? Imagine that there
are two APs, one much better than the other (e.g., closer
and therefore higher signal), and both are forcing a session
timeout after half an hour by sending a PREV_AUTH_NOT_VALID
frame. Won't this lead to us bouncing between the two, when
there's no real reason not to just keep reauthenticating
with the better one?

-- 
g