[PATCHv2] hostapd: reload bss mac files on SIGUSR2

Jouni Malinen j at w1.fi
Sat Jun 30 09:33:36 EDT 2012


On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 11:21:07PM +0200, Antonio Quartulli wrote:
> Clients disconenctions is what I exactly would like to avoid.
> If the mac-list is modified such that I added a new allowed station,
> why should I disconnect all the other while updating the list?

How frequently do you think the MAC ACL gets changed? In general, I
would not want to rely on MAC address -based authentication for
anything, so it is a bit difficult to understand why extra complexity
would be needed to optimize this operation.

> Imagine hostapd is offering internet connectivity in a public hotspot...If I
> were a client I would not be that happy ;P

Depends on how frequently this happens and well, for managed hotspots, I
would rather use RADIUS-based mechanisms for authentication/accounting
and Disconnect-Request to dynamically terminate an ongoing session.

> The idea here was to optimise, and instead of letting ap_free_sta() iterate over
> the list each time, I was going through the list manually and deleting the sta
> when needed

I've done optimizations on the code that was figuring out when a station
needs to be disconnected on configuration changes (including MAC ACL),
but that was removed since it was quite complex and there did not seem
to be enough justification to force the code to be maintained. This old
implementation is included in 0.5.x if you want to take a look at how
this was addressed:
http://w1.fi/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/hostap/hostapd/reconfig.c?view=markup&pathrev=hostap_0_5_branch
 
-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA


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