Re: feedback on attempting to build network-manager from Subversion

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 09:50 -0400, Mark Stosberg wrote:
> Dan Williams wrote:
> > On Tue, 2007-03-13 at 20:48 -0400, Mark Stosberg wrote:
> >> I tried to build NetworkManager from SVN tonight, to see if the latest
> >> version fixed this bug already:
> >>
> >> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=418065
> >>
> >> >From this ChangeLog entry, it appears that might be fixed:
> >>
> >> ##########
> >>  * src/nm-device-802-11-wireless.c: Fix wireless device scanning
> >> scheduler.	The new algorithm is to start from SCAN_INTERVAL_MIN
> >> (currently defined as 0)	and add a SCAN_INTERVAL_STEP (currently 20
> >> seconds) with each successful scan	until SCAN_INTERVAL_MAX (currently
> >> 120 seconds) is reached. Do not scan while	the device is down,
> >> activating, or activated (in case of A/B/G cards).Remove some old dead
> >> ifdef'ed out code that used to configure wireless devices, it's all done
> >> through supplicant now.
> >> ##############
> > 
> > Likely not.  The old 0.6.5 code followed approximately the same
> > algorithm.  I suspect driver issues; if the driver is dropping
> > association during a scan, then the driver needs to get fixed.  An easy
> > way to test this is to set up a plain wpa_supplicant association, and
> > then do successive 'iwlist eth0 scan' events every 5 or 7 seconds and
> > see if wpa_supplicant gets a disconnect event from the driver.
> 
> Ok. In my case I think I'm using the "madwifi" driver, and can try
> "madwifi-ng" and see if it works any better.

You should not be using 'madwifi' at all.  It's quite old, and has been
succeeded by madwifi-ng.

> However, the fact that the problem doesn't come up using the standard
> Ubuntu/Gnome networking tools points back to a NetworkManager issue.

Only as a side-effect.  You can likely get the same effect if you
periodicially run scans from the command-line without NetworkManager
running.  It happens that NetworkManager exercises different paths in
the driver that static command-line tools do not exercise, but that
should work all the same.  If they do not, it's a driver bug.

Dan