[OLPC Networking] Setting up the mesh device

[Sjoerd Simons]

On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 06:09:58PM -0400, Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos wrote:
> Sjoerd Simons wrote:
>> I'm setting the ESSID on the msh0 interface indeed. But i never get an
>> association event on it.. While i even get an association event on eth0 when
>> it's not up (but with msh0 being up obviously) :) Seems i've got some more
>> bugs to file

>
> Why would you set an ESSID on the mshX interface in the first place? I
> understand that, from a solid layering perspective, you should be able
> to set essids on mshX since it's treated as a wireless interface, but it
> would logically separate network users. It's hard enough as it is to
> discover nodes in different channels (although different channels do
> have a radio scaling advantage).

Because we can? Seriously it's not for NetworkManager to decide this kind of
policy, some higher layer needs to tell it what to do. If that's the same essid
for all machine that's fine (most likely the update sugar NM bits will just
have one essid hardcoded). The current wireless firmware might not even
actually bother with checking essid's on traffic all.

The more important part, like Dan explained, is that this is the way
to tell wireless drivers in linux to go and configure what's needed and tell us
when they're ready for actual traffic (by means of an association event). So we
can start doing things like dhcp and/or autoip.

  Sjoerd
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