On 1/29/08, John W. Linville linville@redhat.com wrote:
On Tue, Jan 29, 2008 at 09:53:27AM -0200, Martin Marques wrote:
Manish Kathuria escribió:
I am using Fedora 8 x86_64 (kernel 2.6.23.14-107) on my Dell Vostro laptop which has a Broadcom Corporation BCM94311MCG wireless mini PCI lan device which has been automatically detected and uses the b43 wireless driver.
I have configured the wireless device wlan0 using a static IP address and have provided the ESSID, CHANNEL, MODE, RATE settings. The wireless device comes up and gets associated with the Access Point / Wireless Router when the system is started. However if the wireless router is restarted the wireless device on the laptop fails to associate with it again and I have to restart the network service in order to connect to it. If I remember correctly, the Intel Centrino ipw2200 device on my older laptop never had this problem and nor does a PCI wireless card (Realtek 8180) which I have configured using ndiswrapper. What could be the reason for this problem ? Any tips or suggestions ?
Use NetworkManager.
I tried to run it but it could not connect to the wireless network. Then I updated it to the latest version available (NetworkManager-0.7.0-0.6.7.svn3204.fc8.x86_64) but it dies immediately as soon as I start the service and gives the message
NetworkManager dead but pid file exists
though the NetworkManagerDispatcher keeps on running. Anyhow, this is a secondary problem and I will try to fix it.
Good advice. Alternatively you could use wpa_supplicant (whether or not you are using WPA encryption), or you could simply do "iwconfig wlan0 essid $ESSID" whenever you detect that your AP has been reset.
I have been restarting the network service or running the Wireless Assistant to reconnect to the wireless network.
If you want a technical explanation...the hardware in question is "soft MAC" device which uses the mac80211 infrastructure in the kernel. The mac80211 component has a limited MLME implemenation which relies on userland intervention at a number of points. One of those points is for triggering associations. When you reset your AP, your association is lost. So, you must trigger a new association. wpa_supplicant (which is also used by NetworkManager) is smart enough to trigger the association for you.
As for why it works for the other devices cited, the ipw2200 has a robust MLME implemented in firmware. It does not require userland intervention. The rtl8180 actually is a "soft MAC" device, but since you are using ndiswrapper (which should not be needed in F8 BTW) the Windows driver must contain it's own MLME implementation.
Excellent explanation. I think I need to work on the NetworkManager to fix this issue. The RTL 8180L card is on a multi boot system with Fedora 7 and CentOS 5 so I am still using ndiswrapper.
Hth!
John
John W. Linville linville@redhat.com
Thanks a lot.