[NCLUG] Debian wireless broken

Michael Milligan milli at acmeps.com
Tue Mar 15 15:53:03 MDT 2011


I'd suggest you try "wicd" then, which I've been using in favor of
NetworkManager for almost a year now.  It's similar to NetworkManager,
but doesn't have a brain-dead policy of staying connected to more than
one network at a time and adjusting the metrics to what it thinks is the
"primary" connection, and not allowing you to do anything different.
Wicd will only connect via one device at a time (either wireless or
wired), but you can choose to automatically favor the wired connection
and switch automatically if it detects link, or not.  Your choice.

wicd also lets you configure various moving parts as dynamic or
statically configured, for example, which DNS servers to always use for
all APs with the same SSID, but still use DHCP to get an IP.  And it
remembers WEP / WPA / WPA2 passphrases and automatically runs
wpa_supplicant when needed.

Again, very similar to NetowrkManager, but with more configurability and
more stability (in my experience).

dpkg --remove network-manager
apt-get install wicd

Regards,
Mike

Chad Perrin wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 07, 2011 at 02:43:39AM -0700, Sean Reifschneider wrote:
>> I think the story is that you need to configure wpa-supplicant so that it
>> understands to connect to either your home or Panera network connections.
>> It will do the scanning and detect when you go out of the range of one and
>> in range of another, protected or not.
>>
>> I haven't really used it for that though, I'm using NetworkManager these
>> days.
> 
> I had tried that, actually.  No dice.
> 
> I can get it to switch networks now, but I have to manually shut down
> every process even remotely related to networking, then start stuff again
> to get NetworkManager to stop being wedged and pick up the currently
> available network (otherwise it just sits there refusing to let me do
> anything).  It "works", but it's still pretty annoying.
> 
> 
> 
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