Re: wireless driver workarounds

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Tue, 2006-03-07 at 13:15 -0600, Chris Adams wrote:
> Once upon a time, Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com> said:
> > Any chance you could whip up a wpa_supplicant config file for your
> > network situation, and use wpa_supplicant standalone (without
> > NetworkManager)?  Make sure to use "-ddd" to get the maximum logging
> > information.
> > 
> > the command should go something like this:
> > 
> > /usr/sbin/wpa_supplicant -ddd -iath0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -Dmadwifi
> > 
> > If that fails, then it's 95% likely a madwifi-ng bug and something they
> > broke recently.
> 
> It appears that it broke between snapshots r1447 and r1451.  The r1451
> included a HAL update, so I suspect that is the problem.  I'll try to
> document it more and send it to the madwifi people.
> 
> On the good side, with madwifi-ng-r1447 and today's Fedora rawhide, I
> can connect to my WPA2 and WEP networks (no NetworkManager patches
> beyond what Fedora includes appear necessary).

Great!

> One annoying thing I found about NM while working through this: shutting
> down the NM daemon ("service NetworkManager stop") shuts down the
> ethernet interface, even when NM didn't configure it (it was enabled at
> boot).  This is probably wrong; NM should probably only stop interfaces
> that it started or just leave interfaces configured (what happens on an
> upgrade for example - does a service restart cause network interfaces to
> drop?).

Would be nice, but then we have to read and preserve a whole lot of
state about any random interface.  Additionally, when NM starts, it
takes control of the interface and blows away its configuration anyway.
So the problem isn't at shutdown, its at startup.

NM was originally intended to use only one interface at a time.  We hope
to allow multiple interfaces for 0.7, but right now only one can be
active at any time.  So it makes perfect sense, in this context, for two
reasons:

1) If you start up with one interface configured, but NM decides to use
a different interface, then of course it's going to blow away the first
one, because that one isn't supposed to be the "active" interface
anymore
2) When you stop NM, there is no policy control any more.  Therefore, NM
doesn't leave interfaces connected
3) If you are starting and stopping NM during a normal usage session for
some reason, likely you don't want to use NM or you aren't the target
audience

Again, we hope to expand the capability of NM and expand the target
audience in the near future, but this limitation is directly in line
with NM's currently defined behavior for mobile/laptop users.

Dan