Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> David Young <dyoung@pobox.com> writes:
> 
>>You and Perry should try this patch.
> 
> 
> I'm now running with the patch. So far, it seems to be working better,
> and I haven't crashed the way Konstantin did.
> 
> Remaining problems:
> 
> The interface claims to be on an 11g network when it is on an 11b
> network.
> 
> "ifconfig ath0 powersave" seems to go gaga. Just try it.
> 
> If I have an SSID with a space in the name, say, oh, 
> "Foo University", and you fiddle with the interface, and then
> type "ifconfig ath0", frequently the SSID is now truncated to
> "Foo". This is not good behavior.
> 
> I'm also unclear on whether the ath device completely powers itself
> down when I ifconfig it down. My power consumption in the past gives
> me the impression that it does not, but I'm unsure. It is rather hard
> to tell.
> 
> By the way, is "wiconfig -D" expected to behave correctly with ath?
> When I try using it, it knocks me totally off the network, and I have
> to manually re-configure the interface in order to get it to work
> correctly.

You've started a scan and lost association to the ap.  There is no 
support for bg scanning in the net80211 layer at the moment.

> 
> And on to another related topic:
> 
> It would be nice if we had better tools for figuring out what is out
> there. A user would like to have a tool that will let them do things
> like list available networks, but it doesn't seem like we do. This
> stuff is trivial on Windows and Macs, but on NetBSD even I, a skilled
> user, often have trouble trying to figure out what is going on.

ifconfig ath0 list scan

> 
> wlanctl sort of seems to do what is wanted but the output is really
> hard to understand and (by the way) the usage line for the program and
> the man page don't correspond (there's this magic "-v" option for
> instance.)

On other systems I have been trying to eliminate all the little programs 
  used to manipulate wireless cards and instead unify things in ifconfig.

> 
> As a user, the sorts of things I would like to know is this: Give me a
> list of the wireless LANs I see, along with the various strengths they
> have, whether they're encrypted or not, etc.

see above

> 
> Ideally such a utility would have flags the way ifconfig does so that
> autoconfiguration tools could parse the output and automatically pick
> a LAN for you based on what is available that matches something you've
> put into a config file.

Take a look at ifconfig in freebsd current.

	Sam