"wireless disabled in software"

[Timothy Murphy]

Ranjan Maitra wrote:

> Do you have the driver installed?
> 
> iwl3945-firmware.noarch
> 
> Your e-mail seems to suggest that it was working earlier, but you did
> not indicate what, if anything, you changed?

>> WiFi on my Thinkpad T60 has stopped working recently.
>> I'm running Fedora-15/KDE.
>> 
>> When I hover over the NetworkManager icon in the panel
>> I read "Disconnected   Wireless disabled in software"

I should have said that I discovered the cause of the problem:
NetworkManager had written
"WirelessEnabled=false" in /var/lib/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.state
for some reason;
and re-booting did not change this entry.

Also I noticed that /var/log/messages did contain an entry about this:
-----------------------------------
Sep 16 23:32:32 blanche NetworkManager[730]: <info>
  WiFi enabled by radio killswitch; disabled by state file
-----------------------------------

But how many people would know what the "state file" is?
(I certainly didn't.)
Why not say "by the file /var/lib/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.state"?

You asked what I had changed.
The answer is that my ADSL line stopped working (Telecom Italia)
and I had been using an "Onda MC833UP" broadband dongle
(a nightmare under Fedora/NM but quite usable under Windows XP).

This caused NM to modify or create files all over the place,
including deleting everything in /etc/resolv.conf .
This is a habit of NM that I don't understand -
I cannot think of any circumstances where an empty resolv.conf
would be better than one containing something,
however silly NM might think it was.


-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland