At 07:40 AM 2/6/2008, Robert G. Brown wrote:
Anybody on list have any idea why PVM fails to add hosts over a wireless
link? I've now tried this over multiple distro version and at least one
PVM update, and it just doesn't work. Works fine over a wire, fails on
wireless, and as far as I know wire and wireless are both "identical"
at the kernel interface layer so that any e.g. socket one might open is
absolutely ecumenical about what the underlying hardware is (good old
ISO/OSI layering, right?).
And yes, I'm well aware that from a latency/bw point of view this
arrangement isn't going to be a speed demon or scale terribly well, but
for testing PVM from a laptop or writing code from a laptop or just
playing with PVM itself for fun or profit from a laptop it would
certainly be lovely if it WORKED, however poorly as far as IPCs are
concerned.
You brave man.. trying to do what is trivial in a wired network with
wireless stuff.
I would look for timing assumptions that aren't met in the wireless
environment. There's a channel capacity issue, of course, but there's
also some constraints on round trip messages, particularly if you've
got a "infrastructure" network as opposed to "ad-hoc". A packet from
A to B has to go from A to Access Point( AP), which takes some back
and forth handshaking and protocol overhead. Then, it gets sent from
AP to B, with more back and forth. Don't expect 1 ms ping times...
I spent quite a while getting NTP (which I thought would be trivial..
it explicitly handles long delays and intermittent connections) to
work in a 802.11a network, complicated by the fact that I was using
Access Points (in a "point to multipoint" configuration) as the
interfaces, so the computers actually had a wired ethernet connection
through a dumb 5 port switch, to the wireless AP. Getting PXE and
DHCP to work was trivial by comparison
Lots of weird things happen in these systems because there are hidden
assumptions about timing and whether a path exists between two points.
Jim
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