8.04 networking seems awfully broken.

[Derek Broughton]

Grant Edwards wrote:

> I'd have to say that the networking support seems to quite a
> mess (at least compared to other distros I use):
> 
>   1) There's a daemon called avahi-autoipd that keeps starting
>      up and f*&king up the network configuration.  I configured

A common misconception.  avahi doesn't mess up the network - it gets invoked
if the network is already broken.

>      the interfaces to use DHCP.  That means that if there's no
>      response from a DHCP server, then keep trying until there
>      _is_ a response from a DHCP server.  

Why would you think that?  In fact, avahi is supposed to do exactly what
Windows does - assign a 169.*.*.* address when no DHCP is available.  ALL
DHCP client's time out eventually.  Probably, in /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf
you can set a longer timeout.  It will almost certainly merely delay the
point at which you discover your network is broken.

>      I've never seen even a single network that uses link-local
>      IP discovery.  I'm sure it's cool in theory, but why
>      that's enabled by default is beyond understanding.

It's enabled by default because it's enabled by default in Windows, and
people with heterogeneous LANs want to be able to connect without a DHCP
server.

>   2) Firmware for the the wireless chipset had to be manually
>      downloaded, extracted (using a utility that had to be
>      built from a source tarball), and copied into
>      /lib/firmware.

Yeah?  So complain to the vendors who won't provide let Linux distros
distribute firmware, or get a decent Linux-supported wifi.
 
>   3) I've configured the wireless interface to use WPA, but
>      wpa_supplicant doesn't start on boot-up.  You've got to
>      fire up a terminal and do "/etc/init.d/network restart" to
>      get wpa_supplicant running.

Or just use the default Network manager, which handles wpa-supplicant
transparently.

>   4) Once wpa_supplicant is running, the network management
>      applet seems incapable of configuring wpa_supplicant with
>      the password. It's unable to associate until one fires up
>      a terminal, starts wpa_cli, and sets the password
>      manually.
> 
> End result: a waste of about 8 hours of my time and a black eye
> for Linux.
 
And you expect sympathy?
-- 
derek