On Tue, 2010-06-01 at 07:46 -0700, Sean D'Epagnier wrote: > I really need to set the wireless bit rate otherwise the packet loss > is so high I cannot use the network. I can get by for now by > issuing manually "iwconfig wlan3 txpower 1M" often
That is clearly a driver problem that should probably be fixed in the driver; pounding the TX power and bitrate is a pretty fragile hack. Do you mean "1W" there instead of "1M"? Or do you really mean "iwconfig wlan3 rate 1M"? > I noticed in finish_setup in page-wireless.c the band, channel, tx > power, and rate widgets are purposefully hidden so they cannot be > used. I removed the code hiding them, and they work in the GUI, but > they still don't actually change wireless settintgs. Does anyone > know why they are not implemented and how to make them work? They weren't implemented yet because most people didn't have a use for them, or the supplicant (which is used to control all network settings) didn't support them on a per-network basis. TX power also used to be very inconsistently implemented between different drivers and thus is often useless or not even supported by a driver, and the user has no idea if it is supported or not. Drivers also do not reliably implement allowed power level reporting, which doesn't help NM determine what the right levels are for each driver. Second, we don't want to be using WEXT at all really, we want to be using cfg80211 instead. Jirka has just added support for the band/channel setting to git master for Ad-Hoc connections, but we can't use that yet for infrastructure-mode connections because only wpa_supplicant 0.7.x has that capability at this time. We probably do want some kind of TX Power configuration, but that would likely be a choice between "Auto" (ie allow power saving and auto TX Power adaptation if the driver supports it), "Maximum power" (use the max supported level the driver reports, if it does report anything). But in reality, what you probably want to do at this time to work around the broken driver that you're using is: 1) report the bug upstream to help get the driver fixed 2) as long as initial association succeeds, you can use a dispatcher script (man NetworkManager for more details) to set the bitrate manually when the connection is activated But again, not all drivers support locking in a TX power and a bitrate, and may ignore whatever you've set. That could be the case for you since you seem to need to run iwconfig often. In the end, the best thing to do is to fix the driver. Dan _______________________________________________ networkmanager-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/networkmanager-list
