Re: A couple of minor issues

[Jim Popovitch <jimpop yahoo com>]

On Sun, 2006-12-24 at 18:28 +0100, Peter Roediger wrote:
> Hi all!
> 
> As I'm using a dhcp served network now, with both, wired and wireless
> LAN available, i thought i should give the current stable version
> (0.6.4) of network manager a try. I'm on a pretty customized debian
> unstable, with 2.6.19 kernel, an ipw2200 (driver version 1.2.0)
> network card and wireless extension 19. Everything works fine so far,
> switching between networks works pretty good. But on my day-to-day
> usage of nm I've come across two minor issues I thought I should let
> you developer guys know of: 
> 
> 1) My laptop (like many other laptops i think) has a bright and, when
> not connected, flashing LED for the ipw2200 which I turn off when I'm
> on the wired network. When turning the ipw2200 on and unplugging the
> wired network card, NM does not immediately connect to the wireless
> network. I takes up to two minutes until I'm able to "see" the
> wireless networks around me in the kde applet. And then, NM connects
> automatically to my preferred network. During that time there seems to
> be no way to update the list, not even manually. "iwlist eth1 scan" on
> a command shows all available networks correctly. 
> 
> 2) There should be some checking of the mac address of the AP
> networkmanager wants to connect to. I use my laptop on two different
> locations and it happens to be that the 2nd site has a (WEP key
> secured) wireless network floating around which ESSID is equal to that
> of the first site's WLAN but is in this case NOT the AP I want to
> connect to. NM always tries to connect to this one although the mac
> addresses are totally different. It refuses to choose my preferred
> network on the second site automatically. I can select the right one
> from the kde applet, though, and everything works flawlessly. 
> 
> Besides this, i think NM is a great leap forward in how a linux
> desktop handles the network devices. On the other hand, it is still
> some way behind the Windows (wireless) network client which i think
> works almost perfect. 

I have a 3954 wifi card, not the 2200, and I had to add ipw3945 to the
modules list in /etc/default/acpi-support in order to have my wifi card
work 100% reliably when switching between networks (during
suspend/hibernate).  NM takes at most 30 secs to properly connect to the
wifi AP it recognizes that I have used in the past.  For instance, at
home I can see ~5 APs, NM always re-connects me to my home WAP enabled
AP.  When I suspend to disk and walk down to Starbucks, NM always
connects me to the tmobile ESSID, even though there are 2 or 3 other APs
around.  When I go into the office, NM always connects me to the office
AP, and not any of the various testing APs that seem to be prevalent.
I'm using NM 0.7.0 from CVS, but I didn't build it I used debs that
someone else made (internal to my company).  I would recommend that you
get a copy of 0.7.x, it would be nice is one of the developers could put
some public deps together for everyone... it really is stable.

hth,

-Jim P.