On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 09:54:53AM -0300, NicoEchániz wrote:
On 10/12/12 04:15, Antonio Quartulli wrote:
On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 02:15:39 -0300, NicoEchániz wrote:
Is the setup clear enough now? or am I missing the point as to what is unclear? Please ask whatever needs to be clarified.
Hello Nicolás,
I think I got your point. First, you are talking about the "normal" AP isolation feature that you can enable in hostapd, right? Because in batman-adv we have our own (Distributed) AP-isolation but it has different effects and behaviours.
exactly, it is the "normal" AP isolation feature.
The behaviour is correct: OGMs are broadcast packets. In infrastructure mode, whatever broadcast packet a station sends gets to the AP which will re-broadcast it again. In this way every station gets it and from the batman-adv point of view it is like the packet was received directly from the other sta (the MAC addresses in the packet say so). Therefore you must enable ap-isolation in hostapd if you want batman-adv to behave as you expect.
Does this mean that with isolation turned off stations will try to communincate directly if they can? Say, if we have two stations that are far from the AP but very near each other, will they actually send (unicast) packets to each other without going through the AP at all? If so, activating isolation might be eliminating real possible paths, all for the sake of sane originator tables.
First, this is not related to batman-adv. We are discussing something "below" the batman-adv layer. In infrastructure mode unicast packet from station A to station B will pass through the AP. This behaviour has been changed by 802.11e and (T)DLS (you can have a look at the 802.11 standard if you want more details about that). But, again, this is not related to batman-adv.
If you use infrastructure mode without AP isolation, batman-adv will consider all the other STAs as direct neighbours. But, due to infrastructure mode, packets from STA1 to STA2 will always pass through the AP. This is also why I would suggest to keep AP-isolation ON if you want to run batman-adv on the stations and on the AP, but then it depends on what you want to get.
I believe our mixed setup is not standard practice, that's why I wanted to share this real-world results.
not standard, but common (there are many -closed- drivers that work better in infrastructure than adhoc mode. but this is normally used in PtP links only due to asymmetry problems on the link (see 802.11 standard for more :-))
Cheers!