I would like to offer my 2 cents here. While the proposed fix for this problem seems reasonable, I think the AP behavior is definitely suspect. It is certainly legal for a STA to send a reassoc request to an AP with which it has no existing association as long as the STA has an existing association with some other AP within the same ESS. Therefore, the AP should not return the said error code (WLAN_STATUS_REASSOC_NO_ASSOC) unless it has checked (using some inter AP protocol) that no other AP in the ESS has an existing association with the requesting STA. If the AP is returning the error without doing this check, I would think that it is an AP bug. It would be interesting to know which AP behaves in this way and whether is really does the check correctly or not. Note that the AP itself having rebooted shouldn't cause this error code to be returned, which is what I found strange. Regards, Sandesh -----Original Message----- From: linux-wireless-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:linux-wireless-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Zhu Yi Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2007 8:51 AM To: Jouni Malinen Cc: linux-wireless@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; John W. Linville Subject: Re: [PATCH] mac80211: fail back to use associate from reassociate On Wed, 2007-05-09 at 08:28 -0700, Jouni Malinen wrote: > Can you please identify such an AP? This sounds like a workaround that > makes the non-AP STA (client) behave in a way that does not match with > IEEE 802.11 standard and in general, I'm against this change without a > very good reason for it. I take it an error handling code. When an AP denies a STA reassociation request with the reason "there is no previous association, why do you send reassociation request to me?", this is an indication for the STA to switch to association request and retry. Currently, mac80211 just try reassociation over and over. The result is it can never associate with the AP. I don't see how it breaks the 802.11 standard. If you do, please point it out and how are you going to fix this problem? > This type of change would, e.g., break IEEE > 802.11r fast transition which can only be done using reassociation. In .11r, can AP reject reassociation request if there is no previous association from the same STA? Thanks, -yi - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-wireless" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-wireless" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
