0.7 connecting to hidden network

[Geoff Buchan <esranba comcast net>]

I've been tinkering with nm-applet 0.7 and seeing if I can get it to
connect easily to my hidden, encrypted wireless network when I resume
from suspend-to-RAM. It's almost where I think it should be, but still a
little buggy.

Here's what I do to connect now:
1. Left mouse click on applet
2. Select "Connect to Hidden Wireless Network..."
3. In the pop-up that appears, select my local network from a list
4. Click the "Connect" button on that popup (it remembers correctly my
ESSID and encryption key from connecting successfully before).
5. Wait for it to time out (this takes 25 seconds according to syslog)
6. Cancel the prompt asking me to re-enter the encryption key
7. Left mouse click on nm-applet again
8. Select my local network directly from a radio button (now it is in
the list)
9. It now connects promptly

What's odd to me is why it's not connecting immediately after step 4,
but it times out. At first I suspected it may not have the right
encryption key at that point, but if I run iwconfig as root while
waiting for it to time out, I see my encryption key correctly. I
compared that output to what I get when running iwconfig once I'm
connected, and the differences are tiny:
diff --unified=0 conf conf2
--- conf        2008-11-25 20:28:43.000000000 -0500
+++ conf2       2008-11-25 20:29:49.000000000 -0500
@@ -2,2 +2,2 @@
-          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.412 GHz  Access Point: Not-Associated   
-          Tx-Power=27 dBm   
+          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.412 GHz  Access Point: 00:16:01:93:6A:73   
+          Bit Rate=36 Mb/s   Tx-Power=27 dBm   
@@ -7 +7 @@
-          Link Quality:0  Signal level:0  Noise level:0
+          Link Quality=79/100  Signal level=-55 dBm  Noise level=-90 dBm


When I'm connected, I see the MAC address of my access point instead of
"Not-Associated"; I see the bit rate; and the link quality, signal
level, and noise level outputs all have nonzero values.

So it looks like I *am* setting the right encryption key on the first
connection attempt, but for some reason it's still not connecting. I
think there is some other initialization that happens when selecting the
network via the radio button which isn't happening when I select it via
the list of hidden networks: if at step 6 above I instead click on the
connect button again from the popup window, the connection times out as
before. It only connects if I cancel that window and then explicitly
select the network via radio button from the list of visible wireless
networks. But if I try to reconnect (while I'm still connected) by
selecting from the hidden wireless networks popup, then it will connect
again.

So to recap, by selecting my network from the hidden wireless networks
list, I can't get it to connect after resume, but I do get my network to
appear in the list of visible networks. And once I pick it from that
list, I'm able to connect as I'd expect. 

This is an improvement over 0.6x - in that version, I needed to manually
retype my encryption key, and now I don't have to do so. But it's still
more cumbersome than it should be: I should connect once I've selected
from the hidden networks list.

I'd be happy to help test a patch to address this. I'm currently running
the 0.7 Ubuntu backports Alexander Sack suggested here:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/networkmanager-list/2008-November/msg00202.html


Now if I try to build nm-applet from a clean SVN checkout (I'm currently
at revision 1047), the compilation fails:
utils.c: In function ‘fill_one_private_key’:
utils.c:245: error: ‘NMSetting8021xCKType’ undeclared (first use in this function)
utils.c:245: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
utils.c:245: error: for each function it appears in.)
utils.c:245: error: expected ‘;’ before ‘pk_type’
cc1: warnings being treated as errors
utils.c:246: warning: ISO C90 forbids mixed declarations and code
utils.c:254: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘nm_setting_802_1x_set_private_key_from_file’
utils.c:254: error: ‘pk_type’ undeclared (first use in this function)
utils.c:255: error: ‘NM_SETTING_802_1X_CK_TYPE_PKCS12’ undeclared (first use in this function)

Regards,

Geoff Buchan