Question re NM as for an up2date FC5 system.

[Gene Heskett <gene heskett verizon net>]

Greetings;

When I boot this lappy, NM and NMDispatcher seem to be started ok, and it 
immediately floods the runlevel 3 screen with scan results without ever 
finding anything.  There's a wap11 sitting 18" away.

With all that going on, its confusing to try to type in the username & pw 
to get logged in and to do a startx.

Getting networking to actually connect takes killing all those processes 
and then restarting them along with knetworkmanager.  At that point, I 
can right click on the knetworkmanager icon in the dock and it will bring 
up a network selection window showing 2 or 3 networks, one of which is 
mine.

Then clicking on my displayed ESID, it brings up the key choice window, 
which is preset erroniously to "PassPhrase", and must be manually 
selected to show that the displayed key is a 40/104bit "hex" key.  If 
this is done, then it selects things correctly and the progress bar 
marches across to a complete connection in about 2 seconds.  It 
apparently does no good to attempt the use of passphrases because there 
seems to be no convention for generating a matching set of keys for a 
given passphrase, so the keys generated by that method are totally bogus.

But, several times recently, it has bypassed this "tell it what the format 
of the keyphrase it has is" step, and then it never gets connected, and I 
have to kill everything and restart them all over again until it finally 
does get it right and show me that screen.  I had to do this kill and 
restart 3 times when I booted it today before I was able to get to that 
particular screen.

Is there no way to make it remember that the passphrase it recalls from 
kwallet is a hex key and not the key generator string?.  Is there some 
option I can set in kwallet for that, since its kwallet that stores this 
26 character string?

Likewise, I will shortly enable an atheros based card in my router (x86 
build of dd-wrt), and that understands the more secure protocols used 
today.  I'm apparently stuck with WEP now cause thats all that wap11 
understands I guess.  How can I convert the lashup I have now (I can edit 
the ifcfg-wlan0 stuff just fine) from a WEP hex key to a WAP2 setup?

Also, will it be possible at some point in the future to have it store 
several complete profiles so that should I find myself in a motel a 
thousand miles away, and I've been there before and had it configured and 
working, such that I can just call up a menu and select the home or motel 
profiles and it Just Works(TM)?

Its such a PITA to reset all this now, that I use the radio when I'm home, 
and snarf a radio from the motel and plug it into the eth0 port when I'm 
there.

This lappy will probably get F7 installed on it when the final spin is 
out.

Thanks.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
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Copyright 2007 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.