8.04 networking seems awfully broken.

[Derek Broughton]

Grant Edwards wrote:

> 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.

It's not - but it's also not what I've ever seen.  What do you have
in /etc/network/interfaces?

>> 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).  

And my point is that you have, if you've ever been on a Windows network. 
That's _exactly_ how Windows has worked for years.

>> 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.

I know that, but it ISN"T YOUR PROBLEM!  Zeroconf is purely a fallback for
the situation where there is no DHCP available.
 
> So everytime you boot, you've got to bring up the network
> manager and manually start-up wireless networking?  

No, _now_ we're trying to debug the fact that you've thoroughly b0rked your
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.

As it does...  Occasionally, it fails to associate on my system, but
generally it associates with any network I've previously told it to connect
to.

> One of my guesses is that the network manager either can't
> handle passwords containing spaces, 

possibly - but it seems doubtful]

> or it can't handle long  passwords (20+ characters).  

It certainly can
-- 
derek