frozenbears
August 19th, 2009, 08:14 PM
I'm setting up a netbook (Dell Mini 9) that needs to be able to automatically reconnect to the wireless network it's using if the router is temporarily down, or restarted. I'm running Ubuntu 8.0.4.
It "sort of" works. Here's the deal –– when the router is off, the network manager icon in the system tray does it's little circling motif, and then one of two things seems to happen:
(1) It displays the "authentication required by wireless network" dialog, along with the required wireless key, which it already knows about. Once the router is back online, if I click OK, it will reconnect. It won't do so automatically.
(2) On a few occasions, it totally hangs the UI. By this, I mean that nothing in GNOME is responsive, terminals (mostly) refuse to accept keyboard input, and even CTL-ALT-DELETE is unresponsive. Necessitates a hard reboot.
I imagine the crashing is perhaps a driver issue, but I have no idea why it would ask for authentication. It already has the WPA key, and that data doesn't need to be re-entered in order for it to successfully reconnect, I just have to click OK. This is a big problem – I'm looking to deploy this netbook, and similar ones, in an environment where it needs to function without human supervision for long periods of time, and where a sudden loss of network access (without eventually resolving itself) would be unacceptable. I've got hamachi on there, and I'm going to need to be able to SSH into the machine from time to time without having to worry about calling someone and asking them to reboot the machine or fuss with a dialog box.
Any suggestions? I'd be happy to provide more info if this isn't sufficient.
Thanks, all.
It "sort of" works. Here's the deal –– when the router is off, the network manager icon in the system tray does it's little circling motif, and then one of two things seems to happen:
(1) It displays the "authentication required by wireless network" dialog, along with the required wireless key, which it already knows about. Once the router is back online, if I click OK, it will reconnect. It won't do so automatically.
(2) On a few occasions, it totally hangs the UI. By this, I mean that nothing in GNOME is responsive, terminals (mostly) refuse to accept keyboard input, and even CTL-ALT-DELETE is unresponsive. Necessitates a hard reboot.
I imagine the crashing is perhaps a driver issue, but I have no idea why it would ask for authentication. It already has the WPA key, and that data doesn't need to be re-entered in order for it to successfully reconnect, I just have to click OK. This is a big problem – I'm looking to deploy this netbook, and similar ones, in an environment where it needs to function without human supervision for long periods of time, and where a sudden loss of network access (without eventually resolving itself) would be unacceptable. I've got hamachi on there, and I'm going to need to be able to SSH into the machine from time to time without having to worry about calling someone and asking them to reboot the machine or fuss with a dialog box.
Any suggestions? I'd be happy to provide more info if this isn't sufficient.
Thanks, all.