[LEDE-DEV] [PATCH] mac80211: respect user-set regulatory domain by default

[Daniel Golle]

Hi David,

On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 02:51:17AM -0700, David Lang wrote:
> On Thu, 26 May 2016, Daniel Golle wrote:
> 
> > Hi Daniel!
> > 
> > On Wed, May 25, 2016 at 09:29:23PM -0400, Daniel Dickinson wrote:
> > > ...
> > > If the FCC hadn't already completely knobbish and basically eliminated
> > > (or least required one to be much more determined and skilled) the
> > > ability to use OpenWrt/LEDE on new routers in the US anyway, I might
> > > have some objection (I'm not in the US but Canada will almost certainly
> > > adopt similar legislation since our government tends to do what the US
> > > wants, putzes that they are) on the grounds of leading to trouble.
> > > 
> > > As it is, for new wireless routers, the US, and probably soon Canada,
> > > are shut out from participating in OpenWrt/LEDE anyway, it's pretty much
> > > moot point for those of us here, and in sane parts of the world it makes
> > > sense.
> > 
> > As we have learned at BattleMesh, this whole lockdown madness was
> > actually started in some back-office of the European Comission back
> > in 2014 without anyone of us noticing. As usually, if things like
> > that happend, we Europeans are quick to blame others eventhough it
> > was out own governments making that decission and then encouraging
> > the FCC to do the same on the other side of the Atlantic.
> 
> It's also important to note that the FCC has not passed any rules requiring
> a lockdown. The posted some proposed rules that would require a lockdown,
> but after the backlash have made public statements that they do not intend
> to block OpenWRT or similar (and they started the 'free the settop box'
> project to break existing cable lockdowns)
> 
> Linksys would not be able to say that they are not going to lock down their
> devices if the FCC actually required it.

Well, Linksys (and others using mv88w8864 or ath10k) can opt for really
only locking the radio firmware and thereby create a niche-market for
'open-source-friendly' routers. However, this is obviously not possible
for ath9k and might be hard or even impossible to achieve using other
pure softmac (ie. firmware-less) chips as well.

> 
> 
> Back on topic, I think it's a good thing to default to world-wide and allow
> the user to set the proper country (they should not need to know what the
> codes are)

Ack. Imho the ISO country code is the right thing to store in UCI,
(translated) country names should be exposed to users on the
web-interface, but that's really only on the view-level.

It also doesn't make much sense to store the country-code for each
radio, it's a system-wide property and should thus go into
/etc/config/system (opinions?).

> 
> be sure to have the appropriate dire warnings about deliberatly setting it
> incorrectly and the trouble you could get into :-)

Obviously there should be warnings in the documentation and web-
interface as well as comments in the configuration file.


Cheers


Daniel

> 
> David Lang
> AG6AH