Fri, 04 Jun 2004

IBSS "Infections"
I have noticed something really interesting about our expanding WiFi environment. A lot of work laptops have built-in WiFi and Windows XP. Windows XP, by default, looks for any available WiFi AP and associates to it.

But what happens if that is an IBSS association? Well, it looks like it just stays in it indefinitely, until further user action is made (ie: force new association, profile change, etc).

By walking around with an IBSS radio, you can make a whole bunch of IBSS nodes with the same SSID. They never bother to change their names.

Its a bit annoying because it made a peer-to-peer session act erratically when one third party associated to my IBSS at random with one particular default -- requiring a WEP key. My second peer did not want to associate without WEP (obviously because the third party wanted WEP), and it destroyed my IBSS.

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