[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#673705: network-manager: Network Manager doesn't connect to wifi (greyed out) when device cannot report signal strength

[Gennady N. Uraltsev]

Package: network-manager
Version: 0.9.4.0-4
Severity: normal

If a wireless network card isn't able to report signal strength Network Manager
no longer allows connectiong to wifi networks. This was not so in previous
versions. All available wireless networks are greyed out. This is due to the
fact that the wifi adapter doesn't know how to report signal strength.
Connecting through other adapters (external USB) is possible.

In particular

#iwlist eth1 scan
eth1      Scan completed :
          Cell 01 - Address: 02:18:F8:7A:4E:5E
                    ESSID:"eduroam"
                    Protocol:IEEE 802.11bg
                    Mode:Master
                    Frequency:2.412 GHz (Channel 1)
                    Encryption key:on
                    Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 6 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s
                              11 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s; 24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s
                              48 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s
                    Quality:64  Signal level:0  Noise level:0
                    IE: WPA Version 1
                        Group Cipher : TKIP
                        Pairwise Ciphers (1) : TKIP
                        Authentication Suites (1) : 802.1x
                    Extra: Last beacon: 248ms ago

and /var/log/syslog has the following line:

wpa_supplicant[1826]: bgscan simple: Failed to enable signal strength
monitoring

There are many cards that have this problem, and I do not see any reason to
grey out wifi networks that are reported by iwlist eth1 scan. If a network is
reported one can want to try to connect to it. Greying out is useless, IMHO.



-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-2-686-pae (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages network-manager depends on:
ii  adduser                3.113+nmu2
ii  dbus                   1.5.12-1
ii  dpkg                   1.16.3
ii  isc-dhcp-client        4.2.2.dfsg.1-5
ii  libc6                  2.13-32
ii  libdbus-1-3            1.5.12-1
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2       0.98-1
ii  libgcrypt11            1.5.0-3
ii  libglib2.0-0           2.32.3-1
ii  libgnutls26            2.12.19-1
ii  libgudev-1.0-0         175-3.1
ii  libnl-3-200            3.2.7-2
ii  libnl-genl-3-200       3.2.7-2
ii  libnl-route-3-200      3.2.7-2
ii  libnm-glib4            0.9.4.0-4
ii  libnm-util2            0.9.4.0-4
ii  libpolkit-gobject-1-0  0.105-1
ii  libuuid1               2.20.1-4
ii  lsb-base               4.1+Debian4
ii  udev                   175-3.1
ii  wpasupplicant          1.0-2

Versions of packages network-manager recommends:
ii  crda          1.1.2-1
ii  dnsmasq-base  2.61-1
ii  iptables      1.4.13-1.1
ii  modemmanager  0.5.2.0-1
ii  policykit-1   0.105-1
ii  ppp           2.4.5-5.1

Versions of packages network-manager suggests:
ii  avahi-autoipd  0.6.31-1

-- Configuration Files:
/etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf changed:
[main]
plugins=ifupdown,keyfile
no-auto-default=00:0d:60:89:e5:28,
[ifupdown]
managed=false


-- no debconf information