Service start order question

[Kevin J. Cummings]

Mark C. Allman wrote:
> Thanks for the information on chkconfig.  You answered questions I
> didn't ask, but it's always interesting to learn how things work.
> 
> My questions were (see above):
>  1  Is there a reason for this order?  

AFAICT, some very smart people at RedHat sat down and decided in which
order the scripts should be run under a various number of possible
package configurations in order to work best for most people.  If it
doesn't work for you, you need to be able to describe *why* it doesn't
work for you in a bugzilla report.  Most people who know *why* it
doesn't work for them are capable of changing the order for themselves
and probably don't buzilla it.  YMMV

>  2  Do others rearrange the service start order?

I have seen lots of complaints from certain peoples about the placement
of wpa_supplicant.  Especially since Network Manager treat all wireless
network connections as 2nd banana to any wired networks (to the point of
disconnecting a managed wireless network when a wired one becomes
active).  This isn't always the right thing to do.  Its certainly wrong
when the primary network (and the default route) is wireless, and a
secondary wired network wants to be used as well.

>  3  Does anyone else use wpa_supplicant with the default 
>       service start order without problems?

I wish I could answer this.  I have left it in the default state.  I
have lots of problems with my wireless.  when it works, it works well.
When it doesn't work, its like it doesn't even exist.  Sometimes it just
plain refuses to connect (the 40 second timeout).  Sometimes it sees
surrounding wireless networks, but it won't tell me anything about them
other than their name (ESSID), their signal strength, and whether or not
they use encryption.  Which networks it seems to be a "phase of the
moon" thing.  I can see no pattern to why networks appear and disappear
from this list.  And I can't figure out what channel they are on, or
what protocols they use.  Not even which are A/B/G networks.
I'll be sitting there trying various things to try and get the drivers
to connect when all of a sudden the Gnome-Keyring suddenly pops up and
asks for my password.  This is when I know things are starting to
improve.  Most of the time, it will then connect.  Once it did not, and
it took more than 45 minutes of fiddling before it finally connected.

My laptop has an ipw3945 chipset, running on FC6, using the ipw3945
drivers from ATRPMs (and the ieee80211 drivers from ATRPMs).  There are
even differences between my kernel drivers API version and the
wireless-tools API version.  I'm kind hoping things will be better on F8
using the iwl3945 stuff, but my F8 live-DVD has just as much trouble
making a wireless connection.  (Maybe its my hardware?)

-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome at rcn.com
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us
Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)