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

Jonathan Andrews jon at jonshouse.co.uk
Thu Sep 16 01:33:21 UTC 2004


> 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.
> 

I have to have a gentle go at the kernel people at this point - slap me
if you like :-)

Wireless discovery in general isn't going to be easy across
distributions because for reasons purely political (as far as I can
tell???) the promisc mode was left on the cutting room floor !!! WHY
!!!!

I would have thought that tune, and listen would be the first two things
any wireless driver would be able to do.

I'm sick of having to patch the wlan drivers before I can run anything
other than primitive discovery tools, or sniff......

So how about it guys - complete the API for the wireless so good front
end tools and monitoring applications can rely on normal network
functionality as part of the base OS. So we can maybe monitor for APs in
background when traffic allows and have a truly transparent roaming ...

Knoppix ships the patched drivers and I don't see them running scared,
so why not make the patched drivers the standard drivers and save us
users the tedium :-) 

Cheers,
Jon







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