Re: HAP and Firmware AP identification

From: John Croft (john.croft_at_jcu.edu.au)
Date: 2002-07-30 00:00:23 UTC


Jouni Malinen wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 27, 2002 at 08:08:19AM -0700, R Selvaraj wrote:
>
> 

>>While connecting to the Host AP the ORINOCO client dispalys it by
 >> a thin and plain white box. But the same ORINOCO client if connected
 >> to the Accton AP box it dispalys the AP with a thin black box also
 >> with the text "AP" written on it.
 >>
>>So far I was thinking that to a WLAN station cann't identify the AP
 >> type,ie Firmware or Host AP.

>
>
> Orinoco uses some kind of information polling frames to get signal
> quality information from the AP. This info frame includes also some
> other data like the nickname, but I haven't seen any documentation for
> the used frames, so I'm not fully sure about all the data.
>
> Secondary station firmware takes care of replying to those information
> exchange frames and the driver does not get any change of even seeing
> these frames. It looks like the station firmware uses somewhat
> incompatible data (e.g., Orinoco's Windows tools show invalid signal
> quality for the remote system) and this could be causing the different
> icons for the APs using Host AP mode.
>

Further to this, I upgraded the STA firmware on my D-Link DWL-520, from 1.3.5 to 1.4.9. The Roamabout windows client now shows the signal strength of the remote end (ie: the HostAP card in a linux box) when running a "Link Test" on the client.

It did not do this before the upgrade to the D-Link's firmware.

BTW: my Roamabout card has been running the latest Orinoco firmware (v8.10, variant 2) during all these tests. However, it is using the latest Enterasys Roamabout drivers and client program (v7.44). 

-- 
JohnC
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