Minutes of Power in 9.1.0 meeting

[david at lang.hm]

On Thu, 25 Dec 2008, Hal Murray wrote:

>> Wireless is *so* hard to debug, the programmers can never get to the
>> location where it actually fails repeatably -- and when it's failing,
>> the laptop is by definition off the net, so they can't login to it
>> remotely to debug it.
>
> Has anybody figured out how to run tcpdump on another system?  Do the radio
> chip sets support promiscuous mode?
>
>
>> Access points with encryption have *never* worked reliably on the XO
>
> Mine works well enough that I don't pay much attention to it.  I'm using a
> Linksys/Cisco WRT54GL with stock firmware and encryption.  2 or 3 of my
> neighbors' APs are usually visible.
>
> If bugs happen often enough, then you can debug them.  If they don't happen
> often enough to debug, then they probably won't disrupt work very much.
>
> I just ran a few tests.  I'm just rebooting and looking to see if packets
> start working again.  I'm using ping to measure "works".
>
>
> Is there anything I/we can do to get more info?  Can I turn on logging so
> there is something to look at in case I can get it to fail again?

what I see is that when it starts up (power up, wake from sleep, etc) it 
sometimes pops up the window asking for the encryption key. it doesn't 
always do so, and it doesn't seem to make a difference if the XO never 
leaves my house or if I've connected to many other access points in the 
meantime.

I haven't been able to figure out any pattern to it.

David Lang