Testing the Wireless driver changes

[David Woodhouse]

On Fri, 2008-01-18 at 10:08 -0500, Dan Williams wrote:
> Yes.  The active antennas firmware would need to be slightly altered to
> start on firmware boot, but the normal XO firmware should certainly be
> radio-off-until-driver-enabled (by setting IFF_UP or device open).

Let us make a clear distinction between the two types of 'active
antenna' here. The ones which are actually attached to servers and
acting as wireless devices for a computer, we want to act like in the
XO. When they come up automatically into mesh repeater mode, that's
actually a complete PITA -- and it means we can't reboot the servers
because then the driver can't initialise the wireless because it's in
mesh repeater mode and doesn't respond properly to being reset.

Only for the standalone devices which we're going to hang in a corridor
and feed 5v do we want _any_ kind of automatic network operation. And
then it needs to be configurable -- we have to set the channel.

Since we need a way to configure the channel on the active antennae,
let's use channel zero to indicate 'no automatic mesh'. And please can
we have that firmware by tomorrow, Ulan Bator time -- so that I can
actually set up the school server so that it's rebootable without
subsequently having to disconnect and reconnect the firmware? 

I'd do it myself, but bug #429 bites again...

-- 
dwmw2