Re: Asking for wireless password when on wired network

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Mon, 2008-11-03 at 10:14 -0800, Bill Moseley wrote:
> I just upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 and like the improvements in Network
> Manager.  I do have a few questions, though:
> 
> I've noticed that sometimes the WPA password dialog pops up asking for
> my password.  I have my password stored in my keyring, and indeed the
> password field is pre-filled out.
> 
> So, I just hit enter and then it connects.

The driver failed to connect, thus the password is assumed to be wrong.
Drivers still suck, unfortunately.

> Perhaps related, at one location in my house the wireless connection is
> very weak, so I use a wired connection.  Now, when I have the wired

This weak signal strength is likely why the driver keeps failing to
connect.

> connection I still get the pop up asking for my wireless password.
> 
> Does NM just assume that if it fails to connect that it's an invalid
> password?  Seems after a few attempts it quits asking for the password
> any more.

Yes; though this assumption is not as valid with AP because if
association succeeds, you know the key is right.  It's mostly an
artifact of WEP that we should fix up for WPA.

> Is that just something to live with?

You can disable wireless when you don't need it via the right-click menu
of the applet if you like.  Or, you could make the connection to your
wifi AP not autoconnect (in the connection editor) and then it won't
keep trying, but you'll have to manually pick the connection each time
you want to connect.  Might be a fair trade-off.

> Also, I see there's system settings now.  Does that mean I can save my
> wireless passwords system-wide and have Network Manager bring up my
> wireless before I actually log in?

Yes, via the keyfile plugin.  You should be able to just move your user
connection to a system connection by checking the "Available to all
users" box in the connection editor.  If you don't see it, wait for your
distro to update NetworkManager to a newer version.

> BTW -- one thing I've always wondered:  I have an Apple laptop and the
> wireless connects within seconds of waking the laptop up from sleep.
> But, on my Ubuntu laptop it takes many times longer.  Is that Network
> Manager being slow or the is that just how the wireless stack works on
> Linux?

A few reasons:

1) Mac OS X's Airport status icon fills in the moment the card has a
connection to the AP, but you don't necessarily have an IP address yet.
Thus, even though Mac OS X says you're "connected", you can't actually
do anything on the Internet until you get a DHCP lease.  I've
occasionally had Mac OS X say I'm "connected" but when I try to go
somewhere immediately thereafter in safari, I can't, because the machine
hasn't gotten a DHCP lease yet.

2) Apple only has a few different types of hardware, and they can
concentrate all their effort on 5 or so different chips.  Thus the
drivers work pretty well.  Linux supports ~50 or more different chips,
thus the effort is divided and some drivers just don't work as well.

Dan