8.04 networking seems awfully broken.

[Grant Edwards]

On 2008-07-24, Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:

>> Perhaps that's true, but on my Gentoo systems the DHCP client
>> isn't started until the link is up.
>
> The link is "up" as far as the O/S knows when the wireless
> interface is active.

I watched the syslog, and the DHCP client was attempting to
send requests on eth0 while the link was still down and was
attempting to send requests on wlan0 when it was down (not yet
associated).

When I did a "ps" I could see that the DHCP client was running
on wlan0, but wpa_supplicant wasn't, so the DHCP client was
timing out before the wireless adapter had was associated with
a WAP and was capable of transmitting a packet.

That just doesn't seem like the right thing to do.

>> I guess that's news to me -- I've never seen a network that
>> worked like that.
>
> Sure you have.  Find a windows system, connect it to a network
> with no DHCP server - you'll get a 169.*.*.* address.

My point was that I've never been on a network where that's how
things were supposed to work (despite what Windows does).  On
all of the networks I've ever seen, nodes where supposed to get
addresses via DHCP and were not supposed to do the zeroconf
thing.

> You can argue that avahi gets it wrong - I have no idea if
> it's right - but it is definitely _trying_ to emulate Windows
> Zeroconf.

I'm arguing that I didn't want zeroconf, could find no
indication that checking "use DHCP" meant "and use zeroconf",
and I couldn't find any way to disable it.

>> No, it doesn't.  wpa_supplicant simply doesn't run when the
>> system boots.  If I restart the network, it does.
>
> It's started from Network Manager, so you need to see what
> happened when Network manager started (it's started from dbus,
> not /etc/init.d) 

So everytime you boot, you've got to bring up the network
manager and manually start-up wireless networking?  I expected
the network manager save the configuration anywhere so that the
next time you boot, it would start the interface using the
previous configuration.

> I did - but it wouldn't be useful.  I use Kubuntu, you're
> using Ubuntu (Gnome), and I know that's handled by a
> particular gnome application, but not which
> (gnome-keyring-daemon ?).  

Going into the network manager and re-entering the password did
appear to start wpa_supplicant, but it still would never
actually assoicate until the password was entered via wpa_cli.

One of my guesses is that the network manager either can't
handle passwords containing spaces, or it can't handle long
passwords (20+ characters).  Unfortunately, I don't have any
more time to spend troublshooting it. 

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow! If Robert Di Niro
                                  at               assassinates Walter Slezak,
                               visi.com            will Jodie Foster marry
                                                   Bonzo??