Re: How To Tell NetworkManager There's a Wireless Interface To Manage?

On Wed, 23 May 2012, Bengt Richter wrote:

> Congratulations, you deserve the fruits of your persistence!

Bengt,

   Thank you. But, I'd prefer a few pints of a local microbrew. :-)

> Having watched your process (thanks for sharing it here, and thanks to the
> others who also shared), it seems typical of many. Google is great at what
> it does, but not at directly supporting this kind of information search.
> Too much chaff, and the wheat gets lost.

   I found numerous threads (many on linuxquestions.org) dispersed over a
half-dozen or so distributions. The results depended on just how I
structured the search terms. This is normal and there's not much one can do
about it.

> IMHO the situation still pretty bad, considering all the tools available.
> If you count the hours you've used on this (and coffees you've bought to
> get into a WiFi test area ;-) and gas if you've driven, etc., and paying
> yourself minimum wage $7.50/hr, what was the cost of finding out what you
> needed? Plus $7.50/hr for everyone actively participating?

   Minimum wage here in Oregon is $8.75/hr. Sometimes, if I record the hours
I spend on a project, I don't even reach that level. But, I charge a flat
rate whenever we can define an end point so I don't bother figuring the rate
per hour.

> Will the information wind up on http://www.slackwiki.com/Main_Page
> ? Well, not automatically, I guess ;-)
> It seems a stretch to ask you to transfer the essentials to there, but
> maybe an entry under hardware for your problematical laptop could link
> back to this thread, for a start?

   I can put together a synopsis for slackwiki.com or some other place if
that would be helpful. When I post to this (and other) mail lists I always
try to make the subject as specific as possible. What would you suggest as a
title for a wiki page on setting up network interfaces on the Sony Vaio
model we have? I can summarize it in a paragraph or two and save eveyone the
pain of reading through the ordeal to get to the bottom line: uncomment the
appropriate wlan0 lines in /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf and assign values
specific to that host. And, use wicd rather than NetworkManager and
nm-applet. The latter seems to be missing some libraries despite my getting
all those mentioned on SBo.

   My one remaining issue is that now the wireless works automagically,
booting with the ethernet cable attached brings up eth0 and starts it
running (which is fine for communicating with other hosts on our LAN with
the broadcast route), but no default route with gateway is established. In
/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf the IP address is both on the default gateway line
and in the eth[0] stanza. So, ... until I'm sufficiently recovered from this
and motivated to figure out why there's no default route with gateway, I add
the command in rc.local, just after restoring /etc/resolv.conf from where
dhcpcd overwites it when there's a wireless connection working. Kludge.
Inelegant. But, it works. :-)

Regards,

Rich