NetworkManager and wifi -- what voodoo is it doing?

[Matthew Miller]

Ahhh, for the old simple days. :)

I have Fedora Rawhide on my laptop, because it suspends and resumes that
way, and because I don't mind a certain degree of pain.

For whatever reason, NetworkManager crashes shortly after it starts about
90% of the time. I'm not a huge NetworkManager fan, because it doesn't quite
offer the level of control that I like. And I'm not so keen on its design
philosophy of "be really slick whenever it's doing the right thing / be
really opaque in all other cases". So, between those things, I decided to
install some of the alternate wifi control tools available in Fedora, and
uninstall NetworkManager.

Ooops. If I don't have NetworkManager starting at boot, `iwlist eth0 scan`
returns "No scan results" every time. But if I instead start NetworkManager
at boot, it works fine -- even after it crashes or I stop it.

Clearly, NetworkManager is doing some vital configuration of the interface
at startup. But what?



-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org          <http://mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>              <http://linux.bu.edu/>