NetworkManager troubles

[Oliver Ruebenacker]

     Dear friends,

  Even after clean install, wireless nightmare continues. I can
connect now for a few minutes or so, and then the connection slows
down and finally collapses. This is Intel Pro Wireless 3945 on a Dell
Latitude D820 with Fedora 7 clean install. And NetworkManager.

  Right now I am trying to find out whether NetworkManager is causing
the problems or merely is making it unnecessarily hard to fix them.

  The problem with NetworkManager is that vital messages are absent,
misleading or wrong. To even find out, what it is doing, I most often
have to browse through /var/log/messages, because the applet does not
give much information, and what it gives is not always correct.

  - sometimes, it says it is on wired, although it is on wireless (and
cable is unplugged)
  - once, even the item "wired" was selected and disabled at the same time
  - sometimes, it asks for a new network key, although I already
entered the correct key. There is no option to try again with the same
key. A glance at /var/log/messages reveals why: it tried connecting
for twenty seconds and just decided that the solution is to have the
user enter a key. It does not say what happened with the old key.
  - it spends a lot of time trying to connect, and the only way to
find out, what it is doing right at the moment, is to repeat checking
/var/log/messages.
  - there, you find stupid entries such as "card to slow - get a new
one" - which happens both for wired and wireless.

     Take care
     Oliver

-- 
Oliver Ruebenacker, Post-Doc Researcher
Theoretical Biological Physics and Soft Statistical Mechanics
Cell Biology at UConn Health Center and Physics at Harvard
http://people.deas.harvard.edu/~oliver/