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Williams: That's when I reach for my revolver...Williams: That's when I reach for my revolver...Posted Mar 23, 2009 21:20 UTC (Mon) by rathann (subscriber, #50815)Parent article: Williams: That's when I reach for my revolver...
That's great. Now, if you could give me a configurable timeout for wifi association and dhcp like I asked, it'd be greater still. But you keep refusing, so no cookie for you until you do.
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Williams: That's when I reach for my revolver... Posted Mar 24, 2009 0:10 UTC (Tue) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
No cookie from me due to the silly 'lets break the network when the daemon restarts' attitude.
Williams: That's when I reach for my revolver... Posted Mar 24, 2009 10:03 UTC (Tue) by dcbw (guest, #50562) [Link]
Figure out *why* your associations take so long, and maybe I'll consider it. But saying you want a timeout without trying to see what the real problem is, where the real problem is triggered, and trying to fix that *first* is what I object to.
There's no reason why you need a longer association timeout if things work correctly. It should not take more than 20 or 30 seconds to associate with an access point. If you are near the margins of the network, move closer, deploy another access point in the weak coverage area, or get a better client antenna. If there is a lot of intereference, you need to reconfigure the wifi network to use non-overlapping channels, or use the 802.11a band so your network isn't overrun with microwaves from the break-room at lunch.
Hacking around shit with one-off config options that don't actually fix the source of the problem is not the way to make things better; it's a way to create an unmaintainable, untestable pile of junk.
Williams: That's when I reach for my revolver... Posted Mar 24, 2009 10:36 UTC (Tue) by rathann (subscriber, #50815) [Link]
You can't say you expect people to wander around with their laptops in hope of getting just a bit stronger signal and not be laughed at. You say association shouldn't take more than 20s but in reality it can and it does. You can neither fix all wifi deployments in the world to have perfect coverage nor expect everyone to meet your ideal conditions. I won't repeat what I've already written in the Fedora bug report.
Williams: That's when I reach for my revolver... Posted Mar 24, 2009 13:17 UTC (Tue) by dcbw (guest, #50562) [Link]
But there are things you can do driver-side and supplicant side that may significantly fix the problem. And the user can certainly request better coverage from their administrators if they don't control the access points themselves, or get better wifi cards. I'm not opposed to increasing the association timeout.
I'm opposed to blindly increasing it with no specific reason *why*, and no attempt to figure out what the real casuses of connection failures are.
Williams: That's when I reach for my revolver... Posted Mar 25, 2009 11:22 UTC (Wed) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link]
If the association takes over 20sec, it is likely the rest of wifi usage is going to be painful too, and the user will start wandering around for better reception anyway.
If OTOH only the association is slow, and the rest of networking is reliable, it is a bug somewhere in the stack. And it should be rather fixed than worked around (by adding a configuration option, in this case)
"Make that thing configurable" is often a sign of "cult of workarounds". The cultists prefer enforcing endusers to twiddle settings randomly until things work, instead fixing the underlying bugs.
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