On 4/30/05, Mark Knecht <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Mark,On 4/29/05, Robert G. Hays <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Mark,
>
> Sorry long delay -- slighly busy lately!
>
> Since I was only kinda-halfway watching this thread, and have forgotten
> several details, if you still need this help, could you please briefly
> summarize your before setting & results and your new-install setings
> &results, then I will (finally!) be able to check the Linux boot for the
> ifo for you.
>
> Again, I apologize for the long silence; I just -did- -not- have time to
> even _look_ at any email that was not urgent to making a living, much
> less answer it; just moved it to local storage to keep the inbox
> available...
>
> Lemme know,
> rgh.
>
Hi Robert,
Thanks for responding. No problem about the delay.
I could still use some help. I have filed a couple of bug reports
around this issue. However none of the ideas or responses I've gotten
really get to the root issue for me. Let me recap:
1) I have a desktop machine with a wireless connection. The wireless
connection is weak (I think...) or maybe I have wireless misconfigured
and it doesn't work well. I'm not sure which. However the bottom line
is that at boot time the machine never connects with the router.
2) This machine and a second machine in the house used to run Fedora
Core 2. Under FC2 if either of these machines didn't attach to the
router at boot time then FC2 would continue to try to connect on its
own. It would eventually attach to the network and the user could
start using the network. The important aspect about this is that it
took no root level access under FC2. It only took time.
3) I converted one of these desktop machines to Gentoo. I use Gentoo
elsewhere in the house and am more or less comfortable with it at a
high level. We wanted to run MythTV and I was far more confident that
I could get Myth working under Gentoo. Indeed in under a day I was
recording TV shows. However there have been problems if the machine
needs to go through a reboot. The problems look like:
a) Networking doesn't start because the signal is weak
b) MySQL cannot start because it depends on networking being up
c) MythTV doesn't start because it depends on MySQL being up
d) sshd doesn't start because networking isn't up
e) samba doesn't start because networking isn't up
f) strangely nfs does start without networking being up
Overall it's a mess because to clean up from all of this as it
requires root access and essentially me, not my wife or son. FC2 was
FAR more friendly.
I think that it should be a standard idea that a portable with
wireless connectivity could be booted outside of any access point's
reach and then come into the area of coverage. If a portable did this
you would expect it to connect to the network without having to become
root to do so. I am guessing that a Gentoo machine wouldn't, or at
least the way mine is configured it wouldn't.
I hope it's clear that I think there's a 90% chance that the problem
is mine and not the distro's but I don't know much else to do.
Things I've tried:
Since the machine had a built in wired NIC I tried starting net.eth0
on an address I don't use. net.eth0 starts but MySQL doesn't like it
because the network it is bound to (the wireless network) isn't up so
this still requires root intervention running /etc/init.d/net.wlan0
start by hand.
Editing /etc/conf.d/rc and changing to RC_NET_STRICT_CHECKING="none".
This at least allows things like sshd to get started without wlan0
being online but it doesn't actually get the machine to continue to
connect to the network.
I looked at a package that is supposed to check if things are running
and then it will start them if they are down. I couldn't figure out
how to configure it and gave up.
Things I've not tried:
Any sudo solution. Seems that it would certainly work but it's not pretty.
Thanks sort of the very long winded statement about where things
are. Don't know what else to do right now. The real issue is getting
wlan0 up without root intervention.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Mark
--
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
This is probably not the best solution, but I believe that you could set sudo up so that other users could start only those services which you allow them to start. Perhaps write a simple bash script that does the "cleanup" and allow sudo to run this certain script. Or you could set it so that sudo, again only from your wife and son's accounts, could start up wifi without root access. Check out man sudo it is not that complicated and it can alos be useful for other stuff. It would at least allow your wife and son to be able to do this.
Scott Jones
