Weird iwl3945 wireless problem

[Kevin J. Cummings]

Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-06-23 at 17:31 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
>> With me, NM occasionally gets into a loop where it keeps asking me
>> for my encryption key.
>> I feel like screaming at it, "I've already told you 5 times
>> what the f-ing key is".
>> The only solution to this I have found is to re-boot.
>> (Even ctrl-alt-backspace, forcing a new login, does not work.)
> 
> When this happens (haven't seen it recently in F8 fully up2date), I
> begin by restarting the NetworkManager service.  That's almost always
> enough, but if not, I stop the service, rmmod the wireless driver,
> modprobe the driver, then restart the service.  I've not had to resort
> to rebooting in quite a while.

I too have seen this "feature" in action.  Nothing seems to fix it for 
me.  I've tried rebooting, I've tried powering down and back up again 
too, and no difference.  If NM doesn't want to connect, it won't connect.

> (Note that NM is a system service that runs at boot.  The applet runs at
> login, but connects with the system service.  Logging out has no effect
> on the service.)

Yes, I understand this.  Neither should restarting X have any effect 
(for the same reasons).

>> Admittedly this only happens about 1 time in 10.

When I see it, NM and the "iwlist scan" command tend to agree with what 
they "see" as far as available networks, so I suspect that the problem 
here is really in the underlying driver software, and not NM.

>> As far as I can see, NM is completely devoid of any documentation
>> that could conceivably help if it does not work.
>> The NM developers suffer from the delusion that their toy is infallible.
> 
> That's way more plausible than the theory that they are spending their
> time coding rather than documenting.  The latter just never happens with
> open-source projects...

B^)

-- 
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)