On Sun, 1 Feb 2015, Avery Pennarun wrote:
On Sun, Feb 1, 2015 at 9:43 AM, <dpreed@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
I personally think that things like promoting semi-closed, essentially
proprietary ESSID-based bridged distribution systems as "good ideas" are
counterproductive to this goal. But that's perhaps too radical for this
crowd.
Not sure what you mean here. ESSID-based distribution systems seem
pretty well defined to me. The only proprietary part is the
decision-making process for assisted roaming (ie. the "inter-AP
protocol") which is only an optional performance optimization. There
really should be an open source version of this, and I'm in fact
feebly attempting to build one, but I don't feel like the world is
falling apart through not having it. You can build a bridged
multi-BSS ESSID today with plain out-of-the-box hostapd.
I will be running a fully opensource bridged ESSID system at SCaLE this month.
last year we had ~2500 people and devices with ~50 APs deployed, and it worked
well. The only problem was that I needed to deploy a few more APs to cover some
of the hallway areas more reliably.
There are tricks that the commercial systems pull that I can't currently
duplicate with opensource tools. But as Avery says, they are optimizations, not
something required for successful operation. It would be nice to get the
assisted roaming portion available. But it's not required.
David Lang
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