Weird iwl3945 wireless problem

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Mon, 2008-06-23 at 17:31 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> 
> > s-c-n and friends have only one way to enter a key and no way to specify
> > its type, so to distinguish hex from ascii, you need the starting '0x'
> > character.  Otherwise ascii 'd3adb33f' and hex 'd3adb33f' would be
> > indistinguishable.
> > 
> > NM WEP has the pulldown menu to specify the key type.  So you can choose
> > whether the key you enter is a passphrase or a hex key.
> 
> 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.

(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.)

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

-- 
                Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs