RE: How to disconnect a broadband connection?

[Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr>]

Le mercredi 02 novembre 2011 à 10:17 +0000, Gabriel Rossetti a écrit :
> Because it's not the same thing, disconnecting it (and the wifi, etc)
> means "I no longer want to use the connection", switching it off means
> "I want to deactivate the broadband card, wifi card, etc", it's like
> the hardware switch on laptops but controlled via software. If you
> take the wifi example, I may no longer want to be connected to a
> network but still want to use my wifi card (with kismet for example).
When I disconnect from WiFi, I expect the computer to be smart enough to
turn off the (now useless) card automatically, to save power. People
wouldn't like getting a shorter battery life because of a device that
isn't currently used.

The fact that you can want to disconnect and use software to do wireless
sniffing is really a hacker problem that the default design shouldn't
aim at. Hackers are clued enough to find another way to disconnect the
WiFi without turning the card off (using nm-cli for example).

>  Using the current way I would have to switch it off and on again (and
> it would probably try to re-connect automatically by doing that).
Why would that be a problem? Does it take a long time to start? The fact
that it would try to reconnect automatically is OK, since it's what
you'd want when you turned the connection up.

>  Remember when you used a modem (broadband is emulating a modem), when
> you no longer wanted to be connected you disconnected from your
> provider, you didn't deactivate the modem/pull it out from your
> computer.
I didn't pull it out, but I wouldn't have bothered if the computer was
able to turn it off. If it doesn't hurt powering it down, why keep it
alive?


Regards