On Sat, 2008-02-09 at 18:52 -0500, Kevin J. Cummings wrote:
> Mark C. Allman wrote:
> > Thanks for the information on chkconfig. You answered questions I
> > didn't ask, but it's always interesting to learn how things work.
> >
> > My questions were (see above):
> > 1 Is there a reason for this order?
>
> AFAICT, some very smart people at RedHat sat down and decided in which
> order the scripts should be run under a various number of possible
> package configurations in order to work best for most people. If it
> doesn't work for you, you need to be able to describe *why* it doesn't
> work for you in a bugzilla report. Most people who know *why* it
> doesn't work for them are capable of changing the order for themselves
> and probably don't buzilla it. YMMV
>
> > 2 Do others rearrange the service start order?
>
> I have seen lots of complaints from certain peoples about the placement
> of wpa_supplicant. Especially since Network Manager treat all wireless
> network connections as 2nd banana to any wired networks (to the point of
> disconnecting a managed wireless network when a wired one becomes
> active). This isn't always the right thing to do. Its certainly wrong
> when the primary network (and the default route) is wireless, and a
> secondary wired network wants to be used as well.
>
> > 3 Does anyone else use wpa_supplicant with the default
> > service start order without problems?
>
> I wish I could answer this. I have left it in the default state. I
> have lots of problems with my wireless. when it works, it works well.
> When it doesn't work, its like it doesn't even exist. Sometimes it just
> plain refuses to connect (the 40 second timeout). Sometimes it sees
> surrounding wireless networks, but it won't tell me anything about them
> other than their name (ESSID), their signal strength, and whether or not
> they use encryption. Which networks it seems to be a "phase of the
> moon" thing. I can see no pattern to why networks appear and disappear
> from this list. And I can't figure out what channel they are on, or
> what protocols they use. Not even which are A/B/G networks.
> I'll be sitting there trying various things to try and get the drivers
> to connect when all of a sudden the Gnome-Keyring suddenly pops up and
> asks for my password. This is when I know things are starting to
> improve. Most of the time, it will then connect. Once it did not, and
> it took more than 45 minutes of fiddling before it finally connected.
>
> My laptop has an ipw3945 chipset, running on FC6, using the ipw3945
> drivers from ATRPMs (and the ieee80211 drivers from ATRPMs). There are
> even differences between my kernel drivers API version and the
> wireless-tools API version. I'm kind hoping things will be better on F8
> using the iwl3945 stuff, but my F8 live-DVD has just as much trouble
> making a wireless connection. (Maybe its my hardware?)
>
If you look at my original post, you'll see that I described why it
doesn't work. The default service start order (I believe) is:
network
messagebus
wpa_supplicant
If network tries to bring up a wireless connection that uses
wpa_supplicant, it will fail. I'm asking if anyone ever somehow managed
to being up a wireless connection that uses wpa_supplicant when network
starts but before wpa_supplicant is started. I can't see how, but just
because I can't doesn't mean it's a bug. If nobody can then perhaps
it's time for a Bugzilla report. I'm just trying to be thorough.
BTW, I'm running kernel 2.6.23.14-107.fc8 and use the package
iwl3945-firmware-2.14.1.5-2
for the Intel Pro/Wireless 3945 in my Dell XPS 1710 laptop. I used to
use the atrpm packages. I've found that after resuming from hibernate I
sometimes need to restart (stop/start) wpa_supplicant before I can bring
up the wireless connection.
-- Mark C. Allman, PMP
-- Allman Professional Consulting, Inc.
-- www.allmanpc.com, 617-947-4263
BusinessMsg -- the secure, managed, J2EE/AJAX Enterprise IM/IC solution
