Minutes of Power in 9.1.0 meeting

[Michael Stone]

On Thu, Dec 25, 2008 at 12:19:37AM -0800, John Gilmore wrote:
>> along similar lines an issue I have been seeing with the network screen 
>> (but haven't gotten around to reporting). my home access point is 
>> encrypted and sometimes I can reconnect to it without a problem, but 
>> sometimes it acts as if it's never been connected to before (asking me for 
>> the encryption key). I've had to resort to printing the key and keeping it 
>> with me (not convienient or good for security). is this a known issue? is 
>> there anything I can do to help track down the issue?
>
>I see this all the time, too.  There are some known bugs with encrypted
>access points, but I don't know if this one is clearly reported.  Wireless
>is *so* hard to debug, the programmers can never get to the location where
>it actually fails repeatably -- and when it's failing, the laptop is by
>definition off the net, so they can't login to it remotely to debug it.
>Very frustrating.  Access points with encryption have *never* worked
>reliably on the XO.  I guess the programmers in Cambridge had better
>turn off their open access point, or it'll never be solved.
>
>Like the memory freezeups, I just assume that everyone is seeing this
>and nobody cares to work on it.

Daniel Drake has repeatedly offered (and in the past, made good on his
offer) to help debug reproducible association problems involving
wireless encryption. Other members of the wireless team, including
Ricardo Carrano has done the same. Finally, several wireless folks have
reported that direct use of wpa_supplicant with correct flags (rather
than indirect use of wpa_supplicant by means of NM) results in more
frequently successful association attempts [1].

Perhaps they might be interested in working to write up the outline of a
logic tree for debugging failed association attempts such as the one
that Tomeu and Mel created for debugging memory leaks?

Regards,

Michael

[1]: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/020757.html