Re: A couple of minor issues

["Darren Albers" <dalbers gmail com>]

On 12/24/06, Peter Roediger <p roediger web de> 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.

I am not certain about knetworkmanager but nm-applet (The gnome
applet) initiates a scan everytime you show the wireless networks.   I
think Timo monitors this list so maybe he can  answer if
knetworkmanager does the same.   However all the scanning is done from
the core NetworkManager code which calls wpa_supplicant.   I vaguely
remember some people having issues with scanning and changing NM to
use AP_Scan=1 helped them.   To test this you are going to have to
make the change to NM and compile it by hand.

> 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.

It does check that, if I look in gconf I see that Network Manager has
stored the BSSID for all my networks.   I haven't used knetworkmanager
but I assume it does the same.  Can you check in the kde wallet (I
think that is where it stores network info) and see if a BSSID is
listed there?