Over the last fortnight I finally got the wriggle-on to upgrade all my (K)Ubuntu systems to Hardy Heron. Various issues occurred with each of them, but overall the entire exercise went smoothly (my wife’s little old Fujitsu Lifebook was probably smoothest of the lot). I had one rather vexing issue however, on my old (I’m tempted to say “ancient”) Vaio laptop.
The onboard wireless on this thing is an ipw2100, hence only 802.11b, and I had a PCMCIA 802.11g NIC lying around (actually it came from the Lifebook, liberated from there after I bought it a Mini-PCI 802.11g card on eBay). On Gutsy, I used the hardware kill-switch to disable the onboard adapter to make double-sure that it wouldn’t try and drag the network down to 11Mbps.
This laptop was the last machine I upgraded to Hardy, and I was playing with KDE 4 on it so I was looking forward to seeing what KDE4-ness made it into Hardy. While the upgrade was taking place the wi-fi connection dropped out, but I didn’t think anything of it since Ubuntu upgrades try and restart the new versions of things and I figured NetworkManager had fallen and couldn’t get up. After the reboot, however, KNetworkManager (still the KDE3 version, don’t get me started there) could find no networks — could find no adapters, in fact.
I logged back into KDE3 and poked. Still no wireless (as if the desktop would make a difference, but I had to make *some* start on pruning the fault tree). The Hardware Drivers Manager was reporting that the Atheros driver was active (for the PCMCIA card), and an unplug-plug cycle generated all kinds of good kernel messages.
On a whim, I flicked the hardware kill-switch for the onboard wifi[1]. Almost instantly, KNetworkManager prompted to get my wallet unlocked — it had found my network and wanted the WPA passphrase. I provided it, and got a connection: via the PCMCIA NIC.
“That’s odd”, I thought, and flicked the switch. A few seconds passed, and the link dropped. Flicked the switch on, link came back. Flicked the switch off again: this time a few minutes went past, but again the link failed. Tried it several times again, and the same thing happened. The state of the kill-switch for the onboard NIC was influencing the other NIC too!
It seems that this is altered behaviour in NetworkManager, applying the state of the hardware switch to all wi-fi adapters. If it annoys me significantly I’d like to think I’ll trawl changelogs, or even better lodge something on Launchpad… more likely though I’ll forget all about it having found a kludgy workaround.
I’ve now added ipw2100 to the module blacklist and things work okay (presumably because the state of the onboard switch can’t be reported any more). I’ll also have a think about whether a few dollars for another g-capable Mini-PCI NIC will be throwing good money after bad, as this laptop really is quite long-in-the-tooth.
Oh yes, that’s right… KDE 4. Next time perhaps. 🙂
[1] I can’t think why I did this. I knew that I’d disabled 802.11b in my access point, to make triple-sure an 802.11b device wouldn’t slow my network down… The onboard 802.11b NIC would never successfully get a connection.
Crossed Wires 