WiFi general quality

[gregober]

Hi,

Just a little info about WiFi testing.
For a start, a little reminder of what I am using as a test hardware :

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APU1D with Compex WLE200NX a/b/g/n miniPCI express radio card - chipset Atheros AR9280


There are some good news and some quite bad news...

Good news is that beside the interface detection problem, most settings are to be usable beside the "Strict Key Regeneration".

I have been testing 802.11 G, N, A and most of them seem to properly activate corresponding WiFi settings.

The bad news (yes - there is a bad news) is that there is a tremendous packet loss (due to my provider's link with google !!!).

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--- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics ---
50 packets transmitted, 50 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 11.032/12.233/14.751/1.067 ms


Only thing that I can tell is that at this stage OPNSense is ready to be used in a production environment using wireless devices which is not the case with pfSense AFAICT.

OPNSense works like a charm with 802.11 N

Important settings used :

• Standard > 802.11na
• 802.11g OFDM Protection Mode > Protection mode off
• Channel > 11a/n
• Antenna settings > Default
• Regulatory settings > Default
• Location > Indoor (don't want my brain to be fried yet)
• Mode > Access Point
• Minimum wireless standard > Any
• Allow intra-BSS communication > Ticked
• WPA > Enabled
• WPA Mode > WPA
• WPA Key Management Mode > Pre-Shared Key
• Authentication > Open System Authentication
• WPA Pairwise > Both

Congratulations !

[franco]

Hi Greg,

you scared me for a second there... Glad to hear that the bad news are not overly related to OPNsense. Although I have to say that we've had very little time to bring WiFi up to speed, I am not aware we have actively worked on that part yet. Stability improvements must have come from the base system and packaging rewrite.

There is a larger issue here, but a patch has already been proposed: https://github.com/opnsense/core/issues/201

With 15.7 around the corner, WiFi and 3G are the things I'm going to take a closer look at, which sadly leaves the work in the captive portal area unattended. The ath(4) stable stuff is coming too. :)


Cheers,
Franco

[gregober]

This is indeed very good news !

The overall WiFi still lacks reliability, It works, but It is a bit "rough around the edge".
One needs to find the right settings for all devices on the network. I ended up having my IPhone 6 working ok but not my MacBook Air... strange things.

Also the tx frequency never goes past 52 MB/s where it should normally be able to reach higher rates (300 MB/s). Don't know if MIMO is fully usable or not.

Your next update should allow us to move forward with WiFi and OPNSense... which was (is) a serious problem with pfSense where we are still stuck with 802.11G since ages. I know that 802.11 is moving slowly in FBSD and that a lot of work seems to be done in 11 - but seems to be partially (fully ??) back-ported to 10... 

Thanks for your brilliant work !