Re: Question on regulatory settings.

[Rick Farina <sidhayn@gmail.com>]

On 05/22/2014 02:30 PM, John W. Linville wrote:
> On Thu, May 22, 2014 at 10:41:55AM -0700, Ben Greear wrote:
>> On 05/22/2014 09:50 AM, Ben Greear wrote:
>>> Hello!
>>>
>>> I'm having issues where when we add several ath10k NICs to a system,
>>> the regulatory domain goes quite restricted..  There is an ath9k NIC
>>> with eeprom over-ride hack, and user-space sets regdomain to 'US'.
>>>
>>> Later, when registering ath10k, at least one of those NICs registeres
>>> as 'TW'.  The ending domain looks like this:
>>>
>>> [root@lf1011-13060017 ~]# iw reg get
>>> country 98: DFS-UNSET
>>> 	(2402 - 2472 @ 40), (N/A, 30)
>>> 	(5270 - 5330 @ 40), (N/A, 17), DFS
>>> 	(5735 - 5835 @ 80), (N/A, 30)
>>>
>>>
>>> I tried adding a hack to ath10k to zero out the ar->ath_common.regulatory.current_rd,
>>> but in fact it seems to be reported as zero to begin with.
>>>
>>> I am obviously missing something.  Either my hacks to ath10k are not
>>> sufficient, or possibly the system is getting regulatory info from
>>> somewhere else?
>>>
>>> Any ideas where else it might be getting the idea it should be in TW
>>> domain?  Can it get this from beacons from other systems?
> 
> FWIW, yes it can get this information from beacons.
> 
>> Ahh, sneaky nasty code....it was being set based on the timezone
>> of all things!
> 
> You're welcome... ;-)

To be fair, when I travel I rarely set my timezone at all, and when I do
I normally make sure the offset is right and not much else.  It's easily
possible to have timezone set for a country you aren't in just because
the offset matches.

I'm not saying I have a better idea, but I am saying that timezone is
very unreliable to determine position.

Thanks,
Zero_Chaos
> 
>> Looks like you can override this behaviour with the command
>> below if you are of a mind to do so:
>>
>> echo COUNTRY=US > /etc/sysconfig/regdomain
> 
> I don't know any better way to set a reasonable default for the
> regulatory domain.  If you have other suggestions, I'd be interested
> in hearing them.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> John
>