On Tue, 2006-05-09 at 16:38 +0300, Ian Brown wrote: > Hello, > I see that setting the essid of a wireless card > (by iwconfig eth1 essid homenet) > triggers scanning; > My question is : why is this scanning needed when set essid is called? > and why is the repeatition?
Because the wireless card needs to know information about the access point before it can associate, like channel, BSSID, supported rates, etc. None of these things are indicated by the SSID you've just set on the card. Normally, when you set an SSID and the card knows nothing about that SSID, the card will scan all channels looking for access points that happen to match the SSID you've just set. It can then get all the necessary information that it needs to connect to the access point, but only _after_ it's scanned and found one with that SSID. If the card does background scanning and keeps a list of access points on its own, that makes things a little faster. But the scan is still necessary in many instances. Dan - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
