Direction of wireless networking in Fedora ( was RE: Wireless update to ifup and network-functions )

[Jon Nettleton]

Laptop computers are dropping in price and rising in sales.  Wireless
( is | is becoming) the de facto standard for home networking.  Before
Core 3 gets past the point of no return, I have to ask, "Where does
Fedora Core 3 development stand on this technology?'

For a laptop and even a desktop it seems that a clear cut idea of how
this technology should work needs be addressed.  I understand that the
availibility of drivers is somewhat hampered by the manufacturers.   
Looking beyond that point,  I really see an oversight in how wireless
networking is being treated from the configuration standpoint.

We are really looking at a dichotomy of viewpoints in how this aspect
of networking should work.  On the system administration side it is
preferable that  the administrator has control over the setup.  There
is no variance from the initial setup, and the networking
configurations can be stopped and started but not tampered with. 
These configurations should benefit from the flexibility of wireless
to scan and use network identifiers like the AP hardware address or
the ESSID to automagically know how to connect based on existing
network configurations.   On the other hand, we see the user
perspective that wants the simplicity of easily using a coffe shop, or
friends wireless connectivity.

I see NetworkManager as a solution to the latter of these issues.  It
gives a nice easy gui, and password/key management for the user.  I
have proposed a patch as a first stab for the first issue.  If there
is no immediate plans for moving away from the ifup/ifdown managment
of network interfaces, I really feel that the wireless configuration
needs to be more dynamic than the existing scripts provide us.

As a wireless laptop user, switching wireless configurations  from
location to location has definitely been less than user-friendly. 
Setting up multiple profiles to choose from in grub is do-able, but
not really what I am looking for.  I would really like to see a much
more dynamic network boot process that wireless networking really
demans when Fedora Core 3 is released.

-Jon
  
On Wed, 15 Sep 2004 15:14:34 -0400, Jon Nettleton
<jon.nettleton at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, 15 Sep 2004 20:59:57 +0200, Kyrre Ness Sjobak
> <kyrre at solution-forge.net> wrote:
> > Love to see it. will you post the link here?
> >
> > ons, 15.09.2004 kl. 17.02 skrev Jon Nettleton:
> >
> >
> > > If have put together a function and some new code for
> > > is_wireless_device that uses iwlist to scan available access points
> > > and then ifup a new configuration file if it finds one matching
> > > ifcfg-DEVICE_ESSID.   My questions are.
> > >
> > > 1)  Is this the correct list?
> > > 2)  Is this something that maintainers are interested in adding?
> > > 3)  What is prefered format for patches?
> > >
> > > Hope to help out making Fedora Core 3 the best it can be.
> > >
> > > -Jon
> > >
> >
> >
> 
> Here is my first set of working patches.
> 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=132661
> 
> I realize that NetworkManager will eventually help solve this problem.
>  But I think this is a quick and relatively simple way to get booted
> up and associated with the proper wireless network.
>