Re: Issue: iwlist scanning sees the network; dhclient can't connect

[Dan Williams <dcbw@redhat.com>]

On Thu, 2008-07-31 at 15:31 +0200, Michael Buesch wrote:
> On Thursday 31 July 2008 10:41:05 Johannes Berg wrote:
> > On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 15:51 -0400, Pavel Roskin wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 21:41 +0200, Michael Buesch wrote:
> > > 
> > > > dhclient works fine for me. Although it's true that it sometimes
> > > > messes with up/down state. But you _can_ use it, if you take some care.
> > > 
> > > True.  But b43 has the lowest dhclient survival rate of all drivers I
> > > know.  That's an empirical observation, of course.
> > 
> > I think debian patches out the down/up behaviour. We may be seeing that.
> 
> Oh, that might explain why I don't see this behaviour.

We all agreed at the OLS Wireless Summit that the up/down behavior of
dhclient was just f**king stupid and should be patched out.  Upstream
doesn't seem to be very responsive.

It just kills mac80211-based drivers, and drivers that do firmware
upload on dev->open() because all settings get lost and the driver would
have to re-load everything, which is ton of code in the driver that
shouldn't have to be there.  It's bad for Intel WiMAX devices too
because they do firmware upload in dev->open().

Dan