[Commotion-dev] static BSSID?

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

My guess is that this is not a good idea to include in the madwifi driver, since it goes against how the Ad-hoc standard is supposed to work, and it would hinder interoperability with other implementations outside of madwifi (other Linux drivers, Windows, BSD, Mac OS X, etc.)

But for mesh use, this makes perfect sense from what I can see since more mesh nodes on the same SSID mean a better network, versus with standard Ad-hoc, multiple networks with the same SSID would mean interference, both on the wifi level, and things like multiple DHCP servers, etc.

.hc

On May 12, 2012, at 9:57 PM, Josh King wrote:

> BSSID in an ad-hoc network definitely should be statically set in order 
> to avoid network cell partitioning problems. I remember that hashing 
> the SSID was a proposed solution for this in the madwifi driver, but I 
> don't know if it was ever implemented (I vaguely recall some objection 
> to this as a bad idea, but I cannot for the life of me find the 
> reference to that argument, or think myself of why it might not be a 
> good idea). In any event, there's an old patch posted for the madwifi 
> driver that provides some sample code that could provide some guidance 
> w/ respect to hashing:
> 
> http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.drivers.madwifi.devel/4787
> 
> On Sat 12 May 2012 09:02:40 PM EDT, Jeremy Lakeman wrote:
>> No, we haven't chosen a hash function at all.
>> 
>> On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 3:27 AM, Hans-Christoph Steiner
>> <hans at guardianproject.info> wrote:
>>> 
>>> That's a really nice, tight idea.  I like it.  Do you have an algorithm for it yet?
>>> 
>>> .hc
>>> 
>>> On May 11, 2012, at 10:06 PM, Jeremy Lakeman wrote:
>>> 
>>>> I propose that the BSSID is generated as a hash of the SSID. This way
>>>> each mesh network will have a unique, but static BSSID without needing
>>>> the user to know it.
>>>> 
>>>> On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 3:33 AM, Hans-Christoph Steiner
>>>> <hans at guardianproject.info> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> The trickiest thing for the user of the OlsrMeshTether app remains the ad-hoc network associating.  If a bunch of phones are starting up at the same time, they can easily start associating with themselves in clusters.  Then there is multiple meshes that can't talk to each other.
>>>>> 
>>>>> It seems a simple solution to this is to just hard-code the BSSID for Commotion in general as a default, then allow people to change this if they really want to.  I propose using CC:CC:CC:CC:CC:CC as the static BSSID.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Is there any reason why we wouldn't want to use a static BSSID as the default?
>>>>> 
>>>>> .hc
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>>> 
>> 
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> 
> --
> Josh King
> 
> "I am an Anarchist not because I believe Anarchism is the final goal,
> but because there is no such thing as a final goal." -Rudolf Rocker
>