On Sun, 2011-04-24 at 19:10 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Ben Boeckel wrote:
> One thing I liked a lot with my ifconfig scripts/wpa_supplicant pairing
> is that when wireless is spotty, the network doesn't keep going up and
> down. Instead, applications see lots of dropped packets. When
> reauthentication can take 5 to 10s (or more), assuming that the
> connection is steady when its just spotty can result in better behavior.
> Also nice when quickly swapping ethernet cables. A "network is gone"
> event gets different reactions from applications (particularly those
> that are NM-aware which makes those applications MUCH more annoying to
> deal with in these cases) than "some packets were lost". An option to
> "persist connections despite something probably not actually existing"
> would be nice for situations like this.
I've found NM to actually be quite tolerant of spotty wireless connections.
In fact, usually, it's me who triggers a reconnect (or if possible, a
connect to a different access point, e.g. when I'm at the university in a
shared building with the business university (WU), I try switching from
eduroam to eduroam-wu when reception of my university's eduroam is poor), NM
just happily stays "connected" even with 100% packet loss.
If the driver/supplicant report that they are still connected, then NM
says you're still connected; we'd need wpa_supplicant debug logs to
figure out what's going on here. When this happens, if you do 'iwconfig
wlan0' does it show a valid BSSID? If so, then the driver has a problem
because it says it's still connected, but cannot pass traffic to/from
the AP.
Dan