[NCLUG] Fedora 6 and the RaLink rt2500 wireless card

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Sun, 10 Dec 2006 12:41:02 -0700
davbraley at comcast.net (David Braley) wrote:

> Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> > Yes, you will need to rebuild it for each kernel update. The kernel
> > doesn't keep a stable ABI (except by accident)... 
> >   
> 
> I had a feeling this was the case. I have read that Debian has some
> kind of tool called "ifrename" that can help to manage this kind of
> thing, letting a system identify a resource based on a unique
> identifier like a mac address. Of course, that is Debian.

That's different. Even in Debian on a kernel upgrade all the drivers
must be recompiled against the new kernel. This is why it's so nice to
have a driver thats in the mainstream kernel... it's automagically
updated when the kernel is and breakage is noticed right away. 

Things like this ra2500 driver aren't in the main kernel, so when the
kernel is updated, you must manually recompile the driver against the
new kernel. 

Take a look at: 

http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/stable_api_nonsense.html

for more details. ;) 

Associating a mac address with a specific driver is easy (and Fedora
does this), but that driver needs to exist for it to work with an
updated kernel. 
> 
> > Are you doing 'su root' or 'su - root' ? Try the - in there...
> > stupidly the default is to not have /sbin/ and /usr/sbin/ in users
> > path's. This means if you su without making it a login shell (so it
> > sets the path as it would be for a root login) you don't have any
> > of those commands in your path.
> >
> > It's likely just the path issue above. Nothing to do with selinux or
> > anything. Perhaps the default should be to have sbin in users
> > path's, but Fedora is behaving just exactly as might be expected
> > IMHO. 
> 
> You are right! It is a path thing. If I "sudo /sbin/ifup ra0" (to
> start my wireless card), put in my password, it works! So specifying
> the full path does work. Why does Fedora leave out /sbin
> and /usr/sbin for users?

The thought was the regular users wouldn't ever need to run commands
from there, and only root would need it. I think that's not really
correct anymore... hopefully they will change the default someday. 

There was talk about changing it before fc6, but it didn't happen... 

kevin
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