Re: Disconnecting from current wifi network

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Fri, 2008-05-16 at 11:22 +0200, Jerome Leclanche wrote:
> Hi!
> I haven't been following this list for very long - apologies in
> advance since this subject probably already came up.
> 
> For multiple reasons, I may want to disconnect from my current wifi
> network without connecting to another one, but keeping wireless on.

Ok; what's the use-case here?  If you're not connected to a wireless
network, you're not using the device, and not much useful can be done
with it.  If you'd like to use it for sniffing or monitor mode or
whatever, you want to unmanage the device from NM.

> Doing so currently requires me to disable wireless, unplug my wifi
> key, replug my wifi key, reenable wireless.

You shouldn't need to unplug your wifi adapter, disable wireless should
be enough.  If it's not, then your driver needs to be fixed.

> Seeing it recently came up as popular on the Ubuntu Brainstorm website
> (http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/8612/), I guess I'm not the only
> one having such problems. Are there any plans to add this little
> feature? If not - why, and can it be added externally?

The current applet doesn't really lend itself to this; but reworking
some aspects of the applet would make it more feasible.

The real question is how this plays with automatic connection.
Currently, if you were to tear down that connection, NM would simply
re-activate it, because that AP is available and it's likely the best
connection to use.  Were NM to somehow mark that connection, and not
re-connect automatically, that's just confusing, because the connection
probably has "autoconnect" set to TRUE, but NM isn't autoconnecting to
it.  When you want to connect to the network again, what do you do?  How
does the connection get back to "reconnect automatically?"

The problem is that most things people can come up with for this problem
are not simple.  They will result in unexpected, quirky, hidden
behavior.  We already had something like this in earlier 0.6 versions,
where if you manually chose a device from the menu, NM would stick with
that device even if you unplugged the wired cable.  This was because
people wanted a bit of lag time to plug/replug the cable when moving
rooms or whatever before NM tore the device down.  Turned out to be
really confusing for most people, because NM wasn't automatically switch
devices around when the cable got pulled.

I guess I'd need to hear more about the use-cases.  It seems like you do
want to set Wireless Enabled to off.

Dan