[lug] ubuntu networking: when it's bad, it's really, really bad

[Elyse M. Grasso]

On Friday, June 18, 2010 05:33:14 pm Bear Giles wrote:
> Augh!  For the last few systems the Ubuntu networking 'has just worked'.
> 
> But now, after literally doing nothing but moving a system from one room to
> another(*) my networking is REALLY hosed.  The wired network isn't picking
> up DHCP and the wireless networking is totally hosed as well.  I've gone
> through Preferences > Network Configuration but all of the settings just go
> *poof*.  I tried editing the files directly but the wired network isn't
> getting picked up and as far as I can tell the wpa_supplicant configuration
> is handled by unicorn farts.
> 
> Seriously, that particular service is really getting on my nerves.  None of
> the source files (in /etc/init.d, /etc/wpa_supplicant and
> /etc/network/*.d/wpa_supplicant.sh) seem to refer to a configuration file
> and when I try to kill the daemon so I can set up the networking manually
> some process is respawning it.  But again nobody will admit to it, at least
> via grepping the likely locations.
> 
> Ideas?
> 
> Bear
> 
> (*) Well, strictly speaking, I went from a wired connection to the wifi hub
> to a wired connection to an extension access point.  And I had to replace
> the wifi hub since the old one was getting a little flaky.  But neither
> should matter - several other systems are on that AP without incident and
> DHCP is DHCP.
The service that spawns wpa-supplicant  is NetworkManager, but I have found it 
tends to be cranky about syncing up with some routers. I cleaned it out 
completely and loaded wicd instead which seems happier with my router. (You 
need to be sure the Network management stuff is completely gone or you end up 
with two processes spawning wpa_supplicant, which is very bad.)

-- 
Elyse Grasso

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