[arch-general] network WTF

[David Rosenstrauch]

Jaime Oyarzun Knittel wrote:
> David Rosenstrauch wrote:
>> Jaime Oyarzun Knittel wrote:
> [...]
>>> Can you
>>> associate manually to an access point?
>> Not sure what you mean by "manually".  I usually use either
>> networkmanager/knetworkmanager or netcfg for networking, both of which
>> require root privs.
>>
> 
> I mean using iwconfig directly from a terminal (with networkmanager down).
> 
> Are you able to bring the interface up? (does "ifconfig wlanX up" throw
> any error?)

Ah; I understand now.

It's a moot issue now, though.  I finally got my hands dirty and dug 
into the broadcom wl driver code and I see what's causing this behavior. 
  The driver is checking for capability CAP_NET_ADMIN, and if that's not 
set then it's returning a EPERM permission error on every ioctl wireless 
call.  So all the driver connection info calls done by non-root users 
fail with permissioning errors.

Not sure if that's what the driver should be doing, though I expect not, 
since the other laptop (which is using the ipw2200 driver) seems to be 
allowing these calls through.  But when I rebuilt and ran the wl driver 
with that code commented out, my machine started to behave a bit weird a 
few times after that, so I put everything back the way it was.  Not a 
good idea to mess with kernel module code if you don't know what you're 
doing, methinks.

Also I'm not sure if/how it might be possible to set CAP_NET_ADMIN for a 
non-root user.  But I'm kinda at the limits of my tech knowledge here, 
and wasn't able to google up more info, so I think I'm just going to 
have to leave this unfixed unfortunately.


One other annoying thing about this issue is the fact that the wl driver 
isn't a proper open source driver, integrated into the kernel source and 
maintained by kernel developers.  So although I'd love to report this 
issue and have it get fixed, there doesn't seem to be any forum/mailing 
list/bug tracker/etc. that I could find via the driver's page at 
Broadcom's site.  Very irritating.  I usually avoid buying 
non-open-source-friendly hardware exactly because of situations like 
this, but this is a laptop I got from work so I didn't have a choice, 
unfortunately.

DR