Ticket #10458 (new enhancement)
os353+ XO-1 - randomly, Neighborhood View does not support making connections, but does not tell the user what is wrong
| Reported by: | mikus | Owned by: | erikos |
|---|---|---|---|
| Priority: | normal | Milestone: | Future Release |
| Component: | sugar | Version: | Development build as of this date |
| Keywords: | Cc: | ||
| Action Needed: | never set | Verified: | no |
| Deployments affected: | Blocked By: | ||
| Blocking: |
Description
Sometimes, clicking on an icon in Neighborhood View may fail to produce the expected result.
os353 xo-1 (manually upgraded with latest rpms).
Rarely, this XO-1 system after boot shows three mesh icons in Neighborhood View, but clicking on them has no effect. These situations are usually accompanied by 'eth0' being missing from 'ifconfig'. It is not the hardware -- I can start up (and use) the mesh by manually issuing 'ifconfig' and 'route' commands (with appropriate IP addresses) to the 'msh0' interface. But since there exists a bypass, this situation is not a show-stopper.
My reason for writing this ticket is that on one particular system, Neighborhood View often (but not always) fails to show any Access Point Icons. [I've seen this symptom, but rarely, on another XO-1 system. My remaining os353 XO-1s all have properly usable Neighborhood Views.]
The problem can be an undefined 'eth0' interface (as in #10195), or it can be that even after I issue 'ifconfig eth0 up', that interface fails to scan for WiFi networks.
When Neighborhood View fails to show any Access Point icons, the experienced user can go to Terminal and use manual commands to view the status of 'eth0', and the status of scanning. But as noted in #10292 (for the radio being off) there is no specific indication in Neighborhood View as to HOW COME access point icons are not being shown. To address uncertainty, the user needs to be informed "what to do now" (e.g., by a warning message at the top of Neighborhood View).
But what is REALLY wrong with Neighborhood View is when it *does* show icons to be clicked on -- but that information is unusable. I am writing this ticket to request that a "Refresh" button be provided for Neighborhood View -- to delete existing icons for resources which can NOT be currently communicated with.
I am attaching three system dumps, in reverse time order:
The 19.20 dump is after I deleted 'msh0' from the rules.d network entry (in an effort to automatically disable 'msh0'), then booted. Network manager redefined 'msh0' anyway. Took system dump. [By the way -- substantially later, an Access Point icon *did* show up in Neighborhood View -- so this was not an instance of the problem -- but after booting it was not evident what would occur.]
The 19.19 dump was an experiment at booting with libertas tracing, then taking a system dump.
The 19.16 dump was from my initial reaction to finding 'eth0' not defined. I turned on libertas tracing, then issued various combinations of commands to turn hardware off/on, turn service off/on, turn the Network Manager off/on, turn the mesh off/on. While there is no pattern to regard to which action followed which, there may be a clue (to the missing 'eth0') in the traces resulting from the individual actions.
It may be that there is a hardware problem with the XO-1 with the randomly disappearing 'eth0' (but 'msh0' not disappearing). Even then, Neighborhood View SHOULD inform the user when that happens.
