Re: virtual wireless interfaces / WDS

In message: <[email protected]>
            Miles Nordin <[email protected]> writes:
: 802.11 is this weirdass third kind of thing.

That's why it is hard to know what the right thing to do here is.

:    mwl> I'd prefer that the staN appear and disappear on their own and
:    mwl> that the daemon would just react,
: 
: one of the annoying things with dynamically appearing and disappearing
: BSD devices is, if sta147 appears, disappears, and reappears, you
: don't know if it's the same sta147, it's a different sta147, or you
: don't know if it's the same or different.  Sometimes I think this
: 3-case information is ascertainable by the driver but there is no way
: to pass it up.  maybe that is more with mounted disks than network
: devices, but if you run into that problem unexpectedly while working
: on this it'd be nice if you solved it cleanly for everyone else, too.

This is a well known problem.  However, in FreeBSD pccard devices
behave this way and people are used to it.  NetBSD tries to make sure
they are the same, but I have so little experience with NetBSD's
numbering that I can't comment on it.

One can work around the problem by never reusing a number I suppose,
but I don't like that.  The sta are just tags and one should ask the
sta what it is before you configure it.  Unlike xl0 or wi0, which one
could assume one knows what physical device they are, the stas are
definitely a dynamic concept and we shouldn't try to impose a static
world view on them.  sta0 might be joe's laptop today, and mike router
tomorrow or next reboot.

:     dy> if the wi(4) belongs to a bridge, it should add all of its sta
:     dy> to the bridge?
: 
: Does the abstraction support hostap drivers that can create more than
: one nwid, setting different parameters, and IP addresses, for each?  

I'm not sure that all devices' firmware supports having multiple
nwid.  The packet engine devices certainly would, however.

Warner
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