"wireless disabled in software"

[Craig White]

On Sat, 2011-09-17 at 12:55 +0200, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> 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.
----
on the other hand, if you don't have any configured network adaptor, the
content of /etc/resolv.conf is entirely irrelevant and when you do
configure a network adaptor, the contents of /etc/resolv.conf become
relevant. If you get an IP address automatically (ie DHCP-client), then
it is configured automatically. If you enter an IP address manually, you
will need to enter dns server addresses manually since the ones you
choose are indeed relevant to the newly configured IP address.

Craig



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