Re: Ad-Hoc with Windows?

On Thu, 2002-05-02 at 18:30, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> That's because you're not running in ad-hoc mode, for some definition
> of ad-hoc.

Right.

> Basically, IBSS mode (the IEEE 802.11 sanctioned peer-to-peer mode) is
> the only one which works generally.  That's why we couldn't get any
> connectivity with the Linux people on 27 December last year
> (http://www.lemis.com/~grog/xmas-bbq-2001.html for those of you who
> weren't there).  We were running in demo ad-hoc mode, while Chris and
> Rusty were trying to connect in IBSS mode, so it couldn't work.  Since
> then (at the LCA in February) we clarified the situation.  The
> results:

OK, sounds sensible so far :)
> - The BSDs are doing it wrong.  We should be using IBSS mode, not demo
>   ad-hoc.
> - IBSS mode works with all systems I've tried it with.
> - To set IBSS mode with Lucent cards, use -p 1 (just like managed mode
>   or whatever we'll call it this time).
> - At least one interface must also do -c 1 (create IBSS).  Note that
>   it says in the man page that it doesn't work.  The man page lies.
> - In all cases we've seen, the resultant BSSID is the MAC address of
>   the IBSS interface with the first octet xored with 0x02.  I'd be
>   interested to hear if anybody finds another value.  The standard
>   just says the BSSID will be random.
> - On the Lucent cards, you don't get a signal strength indication.

OK.. If I do -c I can now get 2 Lucents to talk in FreeBSD.
*reboots*
Windows works too.
Excellent :)

> One of the details about which Wes and I couldn't agree was whether an
> IBSS can route to the outside world.  I say yes, because any system in
> the IBSS can have other interfaces as well.  This isn't covered in the
> 802.11 standard, of course.  Wes says no, because the 802.11 standard
> (available for free from
> http://standards.ieee.org/getieee802/download/802.11-1999.pdf, which
> is nevertheless a web page) says that interconnection only works with
> BSS (i.e. managed) mode.  I claim that this just refers to link-level
> interconnection, and that IP routing has nothing to do with 802.11.
> Comments welcome.

Hmmm.. well your argument sounds sensible to me..

ie the 802.11 standard covers the link layer. I would say the only
reason an access point has an interconnect is because it is basically a
bridge.

Also, from a practical point of view your argument is saner IMHO :)

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
GPG Fingerprint - 9A8C 569F 685A D928 5140  AE4B 319B 41F4 5D17 FDD5


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