[pkg-wpa-devel] Bug#768862: Bug#768862: wpasupplicant: large beacon interval is badly tolerated

[Stefan Lippers-Hollmann]

Control: severity -1 minor
Control: tags -1 upstream

Hi

On Sunday 09 November 2014, Vitez Gabor wrote:
[...]
> With a wifi AP with a 1 second beacon interval wpa_supplicant will take
> multiple seconds to find the network, when theoretically 1 second should be
> enough. Neither Android, nor Windows suffers from this problem, they both
> find the network with very small delay.
> 
> Setting autoscan=periodic:-1 in wpa_supplicant.conf seems to resolv the
> problem, so I propose setting the defaults accordingly. 
> 
> (The problem seems to lie in using a too short scan duration, coupled with a
> too long delay between the scans, so the AP and wpa_supplicant have no
> chance to find eachother.)
[...]

I'd suggest to take this upstream, as I'm not very confident in 
diverging from upstream's defaults in this regard. 

My reason for this is that I consider APs with these large beacon
intervalls to be misconfigured. So assuming the the only result of
said 'broken' AP configuration is that it takes a few seconds, rather
than just one second[1], to find the network, the tradeoff/ penalty is
imho in the correct place; accordingly I've lowered the severity of
this bug to minor. I know that significant tweaking has gone into 
finding a good strategy to deal with background scanning and related 
infrastructure, so blindly changing these defaults from Debian's side
feels wrong to me. Given that I currently don't know about any networks
'misconfigured' in this way and therefore can't debug it locally, I'd 
appreciate if you could approach upstream under 

	HostAP mailing list
	HostAP at lists.shmoo.com
	http://lists.shmoo.com/mailman/listinfo/hostap

and present your case.

Regards
	Stefan Lippers-Hollmann

[1]	Like there are several scanning strategies selectable via the 
	ap_scan configuration setting, which might be needed in different
	circumstances.
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