----- Original Message ----- From: "Iljitsch van Beijnum" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > As for 2., it seems some stuff tries to hang on to the same base > station network when the base station in use disappears while other > implementations simply jump to the strongest network they can find, > even if this is a different SSID (when the SSID isn't explicitly > selected) or a peer to peer network using the same SSID.
I am not an 802.11 genius and am not trying to debug a LAN protocol I understand vaguely on the IETF discussion list without looking at the specs first, BUT this is approximately the behavior I thought I was seeing, too - I happened to be running Network Stumbler, especially Tuesday and Wednesday (just before the network hygiene signs were taped to all the rest room doors, in a burst of fitting irony). What I THOUGHT I was seeing was a heckuvalotta peer-to-peer transmitters insisting they were ietf58, but (at least by the time I noticed a problem and turned my attention to Network Stumbler) there were also a pretty good collection of access points for ietf58 that were reachable and active. FWIW, if my (Dell TrueMobile) card had lost its mind and connected to a different SSID based on signal strength, I would have expected to see the Hilton network pop up at least once, and I never did, so I'd be a tiny bit surprised if that was happening. It looks more like the check was for strongest signal with same SSID, not including "is this also an access point?" check. Once that happened, of course, I was off into the land of link-local addresses, etc. > Obviously it > would help if the clients improved their behavior, but wouldn't it also > make sense for the base stations to simply not disappear? That would > also solve the problem. I had a nice conversation with one of the university NOC chaps on Friday morning, who said a lot of the access points came up transmitting at 1 milliwatt, which was plenty until somebody walked between you and the transmitter. This should have been fine (just find another transmitter, right?), but the process kept stumbling over adjacent machines already announcing ietf58 in ad hoc mode, and (like all great networking phenomenon these days) the problem managed to spread because when (if?) the new machine went into ietf58 peer-to-peer mode, it's now close to other machines, so the next time someone interrupts their signal from the access point, they home on you, and... Sorry I don't remember the name - hope I said "thank you" then! Spencer