improving XO connectivity rates

[Daniel Drake]

The XO OS has a long-standing bug where establishing connections to
networks will fail approximately 1 in 25 tries. Regardless of
open/WEP/WPA/etc. It will also affect wired networks.
Actually, the connection succeeds, the problem is that the
notification of success does not reach NetworkManager, so it decides
that the connection failed and moved on.

This is http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/8104
The bug is in dbus, a system component that allows processes to send
messages to each other. Turns out it has a well-known bug where it
will fail to deliver messages in certain conditions.

Anyhow, I finally sat down to measure the failures and test a
workaround, and the workaround definitely seems to be working fine. If
you'd like to try it, you simply have to replace the shell script at
/etc/NetworkManager/callouts/nm-dhcp-client.action with this binary:
http://dev.laptop.org/attachment/ticket/8104/nm-dhcp-action (named as
nm-dhcp-client.action). If you don't trust my binary, you can find the
.c source on the ticket and compile it yourself. This is for NM-0.6
only.

Is anyone interested in attacking the dbus bug itself? Details are at
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dbus/2008-March/009526.html
It is tricky, but will be a very significant improvement! It
definitely still exists in the latest code.

Daniel