[arch-general] network WTF

[André Ramaciotti]

I know this isn't of great help, but in the forum there are lots of
people complaining that iwlist isn't working as non-root user with the
new kernel (2.6.29)

On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 5:48 AM, Jaime Oyarzun Knittel
<joyarzun at alumnos.inf.utfsm.cl> wrote:
> David Rosenstrauch wrote:
>> Got a bit of network weirdness going on here.  2 different Arch laptops,
>> an old one and a new one, with completely different hardware (and also
>> i686 vs. x86_64), but both are completely up to date with the latest
>> repos.  On the old (i686) one, "iwlist scan" works fine from the command
>> line, as a non-root user.  On the new one, no dice - I need to be root
>> to get back results.
>
> Normally 'iwlist wlanX scan' as user just reads a previous scan, and
> with root privileges it does actually scan for networks.
>
>>
>> What makes this even more annoying is that apparently some of the
>> wireless tools I'm using suffer from this restriction as well.  So on
>> the old laptop, kwifimanager and knemo show accurate info about the
>> current connection (bit rate, link quality, etc.) while on the new
>> laptop these come up empty.
>
> Maybe it's a group issue? Are the users in the 'network' group? Can you
> associate manually to an access point?
>
>>
>> Anyone have any idea what's causing this and/or how to work around it?
>> Surely I don't need to run kwifimanager and knemo as root to do it.
>>
>> I'm guessing there's some obscure setting that's different between the 2
>> machines that's controlling this, but I have no clue what it could be.
>>
>
> If it's not a permission issue, my guess is that the wireless cards send
> different results (assuming they're different cards).
>
> Maybe you should start the 'broken' machine with a LiveCD from another
> distro or ArchLinux i686 LiveCD to see if it's Arch failing or your
> hardware.
>
> I hope it helps.
>
> --
> mitoyarzun
> http://www.archlinux.cl/
>