Service start order question

[Mark C. Allman]

On Sat, 2008-02-09 at 18:52 -0500, Kevin J. Cummings wrote:
> 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?)
> 
If you look at my original post, you'll see that I described why it
doesn't work.  The default service start order (I believe) is:
  network
  messagebus
  wpa_supplicant

If network tries to bring up a wireless connection that uses
wpa_supplicant, it will fail.  I'm asking if anyone ever somehow managed
to being up a wireless connection that uses wpa_supplicant when network
starts but before wpa_supplicant is started.  I can't see how, but just
because I can't doesn't mean it's a bug.  If nobody can then perhaps
it's time for a Bugzilla report.  I'm just trying to be thorough.

BTW, I'm running kernel 2.6.23.14-107.fc8 and use the package
    iwl3945-firmware-2.14.1.5-2
for the Intel Pro/Wireless 3945 in my Dell XPS 1710 laptop.  I used to
use the atrpm packages.  I've found that after resuming from hibernate I
sometimes need to restart (stop/start) wpa_supplicant before I can bring
up the wireless connection.

-- Mark C. Allman, PMP
-- Allman Professional Consulting, Inc.
-- www.allmanpc.com, 617-947-4263

BusinessMsg -- the secure, managed, J2EE/AJAX Enterprise IM/IC solution