Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 133500
wireless device configuration does not allow changes to channel or transmit rate
Last modified: 2008-05-06 20:00:51 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040914 Firefox/0.10 Description of problem: I have a Symbol LA4111 Spectrum24 Wireless LAN PC Card and am using WEP with it. For me to get this to work, I have to be able to change the channel to 6 and the transmit rate to auto. By default, the wireless device configuration GUI has channel 1 and transmit rate of 11Mbps, and these are not changeable through the GUI. To get my card to associate and dhcp, I have to manually change /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 and change channel to 6 and transmit rate to auto. Once I do this, the card works wonderfully. Can you please enable these changes to be made from the GUI? If you did, I believe that no CLI would be needed to get this wireless card (are other cards having the same problem too?) to work with fedora. thanks!!! Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): system-config-network-1.3.20-1 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. launch the network configurator 2. either edit an existing wireless device or create a new one 3. try to change channel or transmit rate 4. these GUI elements are disabled and the user cannot change the values needing to be changed Actual Results: wireless card is unable to associate to an AP that does not operate on the same channel as the default, disabled one (channel 1). Expected Results: user should be able to change these 2 form elements, enabling him/her to specify what transmit rate and channel the card should operate at. Additional info:
If you change the "Mode" to "Auto" or "Ad-Hoc", you can specify the channel and the transmit rate... Why do you need to set this in "Managed" mode?????
well, I'll be darned. lol. I must have wasted a good day at least trying to work around this. Had I only known that using "Auto" instead of "Managed" would let me do this... it would have saved me lots of time. =:/ This is from the iwconfig man page: mode Set the operating mode of the device, which depends on the net- work topology. The mode can be Ad-Hoc (network composed of only one cell and without Access Point), Managed (node connects to a network composed of many Access Points, with roaming), Master (the node is the synchronisation master or acts as an Access Point), Repeater (the node forwards packets between other wire- less nodes), Secondary (the node acts as a backup mas- ter/repeater), Monitor (the node acts as a passive monitor and only receives packets) or Auto. Example : iwconfig eth0 mode Managed iwconfig eth0 mode Ad-Hoc The topology that I'm in best fits the description of "Managed", namely "node connects to a network composed of many Access Points, with roaming". This is why I chose "Managed", and in fact, have used Managed for quite a while with success in debian before I started using fedora, when I iwconfig'd my card manually. Is there a reason that transmit rate and channel should not be changed when a card is in a managed topology? The user should still be allowed to change these things, shouldn't he?
this is still a problem, and now is causing a problem with NetworkManager, I believe, since NetworkManager only works for me if mode is set to Managed, which as noted above, isn't configurable for me via the GUI. Is this being looked at anymore?
In managed mode, the card itsself searches for the ESSID on every channel, so I thought this is not necessary..
Well, according to the iwconfig man page I quoted above, it sounds like a the very least, it would be the correct thing to do, I thought. And, I can say with certainty that unless I'm able to configure the channel and rate via the GUI config tool, my wireless card does not work. Thanks Harald!!
Fedora Core 3 is now maintained by the Fedora Legacy project for security updates only. If this problem is a security issue, please reopen and reassign to the Fedora Legacy product. If it is not a security issue and hasn't been resolved in the current FC5 updates or in the FC6 test release, reopen and change the version to match. Thank you!
Based on the date this bug was created, it appears to have been reported against rawhide during the development of a Fedora release that is no longer maintained. In order to refocus our efforts as a project we are flagging all of the open bugs for releases which are no longer maintained. If this bug remains in NEEDINFO thirty (30) days from now, we will automatically close it. If you can reproduce this bug in a maintained Fedora version (7, 8, or rawhide), please change this bug to the respective version and change the status to ASSIGNED. (If you're unable to change the bug's version or status, add a comment to the bug and someone will change it for you.) Thanks for your help, and we apologize again that we haven't handled these issues to this point. The process we're following is outlined here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/F9CleanUp We will be following the process here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping to ensure this doesn't happen again.
This bug has been in NEEDINFO for more than 30 days since feedback was first requested. As a result we are closing it. If you can reproduce this bug in the future against a maintained Fedora version please feel free to reopen it against that version. The process we're following is outlined here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/F9CleanUp