Re: Does anyone understand NetworkManager?

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Mon, 2006-08-14 at 09:42 -0400, Darren Albers wrote:
> On 8/14/06, David Abrahams <dave boost-consulting com> wrote:
> <snip>
> > How do wireless connection problems with network
> > manager/wpa_supplicant get solved?  Do they get solved, or do people
> > just give up?  Really, this is not meant to be a rant; I do deeply
> > appreciate that people work on and support this stuff for free.
> 
> I guess I should add a "How to get help section to the FAQ" listing
> all the information someone might need to debug the connection.  Part
> of the problem is that many of the issues have been resolved and the
> fixes just not backported to the various distributions and many of the
> people who frequent this list are taking breaks at the end of the
> summer.
> 
> When I saw your post I read the logs but didn't see anything that
> would indicate a problem.  I vaguely remember some issues with hidden
> SSID's that were fixed in 0.6.3 that the Ubuntu maintainer may not
> have backported.  Can you try broadcasting your SSID and see if it
> works?

That would be a big help.  Some drivers (madwifi in particular) don't
seem to work well with hidden SSIDs and wpa_supplicant and
NetworkManager, and that interaction isn't well understood.  It has
something to do with AP_SCAN and the network options that are passed to
wpa_supplicant.

Can you try with wpa_supplicant alone, constructing the necessary
wpa_supplicant.conf, and see if that works?  Please use the 'wext'
driver with wpa_suppliant.  If you're able to connect fairly
consistently, please post that config file, removing sensitive
information of course.

> What type of card are you using?  I have seen a similar problem with
> an Atheros (Madwifi) card I have.  I resolved it by building the
> latest madwifi drivers by hand (Which then required me to build the
> newer version of Network Manager).  If the problem is just that 0.6.2
> can't reliably connect to hidden networks then broadcasting your SSID
> would be an easier fix.  Not broadcasting your SSID is not more of a
> hindrance than a security measure anyway...
> 
> > I am using Ubuntu Dapper, on which there is seemingly no
> > wpa_supplicant.conf, which makes it pretty hard to relate any
> > documentation I read to actual diagnosis on my machine.
> 
> No need to post that, that is only needed if you are using some
> unusual EAP combination.

Unless you can get it working with plain wpa_supplicant, that is.  There
have been some intermittent issues with the config which NM sends to
wpa_supplicant not connecting, but a plain wpa_supplicant config doing
fine.  I'm sort of holding off on looking into that until we move to a
dbus-enabled wpa_supplicant to determine whether it's the control
interface stupidity, or NM itself passing wrong combinations of options.

Dan