getscanlist command redundant?

[Ronak Chokshi]

Dan and Marcelo,
Your comments are pretty much accurate. extscan is used to scan for a
particular SSID and getscanlist is actually is get the latest scan
results from the scan buffers in the driver. Unlike, 'iwlist ethX scan',
issuing getscanlist does not really issue a scan - it just gets the
latest scan results from the drivers.

As you can probably envision, these commands are used for roaming use
cases. For example, application would use the getscanlist to get the
latest set of probe responses or would use the extscan to actually scan
for one particular AP.

Thanks 
Ronak

-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Williams [mailto:dcbw at redhat.com] 
Sent: Thursday, November 16, 2006 5:02 AM
To: Marcelo Tosatti
Cc: Ronak Chokshi; Alan Cunningham; libertas-dev at lists.infradead.org
Subject: Re: getscanlist command redundant?

On Thu, 2006-11-16 at 03:26 -0200, Marcelo Tosatti wrote:
> Ronak,
> 
> wlanconfig contains the "extscan/getscanlist" commands:
> 
> extscan
>         This command is used to do a specific scan.
> 
>         Usage: wlanconfig ethX extscan <SSID>
> 
>         Example:
>                 wlanconfig ethX extscan LINKSYS-AP
> 
>         To see the results of use getscanlist command.
> 
> getscanlist
>         This command is used to get the scan results.
> 
>         Usage: wlanconfig ethX getscanlist
> 
>         Example:
>                 wlanconfig ethX getscanlist
> 
> What is the purpose of the extscan command? One can achieve same
results
> by doing a "iwlist ethX scan" and looking for a specific SSID, right?
Or
> am I missing something? 

Likely, yes.  iwlist doesn't let you scan for a particular SSID at all
at this time, but the SIOCSIWSCAN handler does allow this, and drivers
like the IPW cards implement the specific-SSID scan option.  We should
too if we don't already.

Other than that, there seems to be some redundancy here.

dan

> And about "getscanlist", I don't see how it provides any additional
> information other than "iwlist ethX scan" and "getscantable" ?
> 
> -bash-3.1# ./wlanconfig eth0 getscanlist
> Driver build with Wireless Extension 21
> 
> BSSID:   00:13:46:36:EB:48
> SSID:    ult
> NetMode: infra
> Quality: 216
> Privacy: disabled
> 
> No of AP's = 1
> 
> Thanks
> 
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