8.04 networking seems awfully broken.

[Grant Edwards]

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

So when the cable gets plugged in, avahi will give up control
and an address will be retreived via DHCP?

>>      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.

Perhaps that's true, but on my Gentoo systems the DHCP client
isn't started until the link is up.  

> 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.

I guess that's news to me -- I've never seen a network that
worked like that.

>>   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.

I guess that's an option.  Or I could switch to a distro that
does provide support for things like that.

>>   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.

No, it doesn't.  wpa_supplicant simply doesn't run when the
system boots.  If I restart the network, it does.

>>   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.

No response for that one eh?

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow! RELATIVES!!
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