Need ability to turn mesh off as it breaks some wireless devices

[Phil]

I've heard twice today from two different folks that having their XO up and running seems to cause problems with other wireless devices. It seems that a number of poorly-written wireless device drivers don't like having the mesh network up in their presence.

I've been telling people to do 'su - -c '/sbin/ifconfig msh0 down'" to turn the mesh off, but I suspect that we should expose this via sugar-control-panel or something similar.

This is causing problems with other devices, although not the XO itself, amusingly.

[jg]

There appear to be a few types of (buggy) access points that are buggy and have problems. Those are being investigated.

Without a lot more specific information about what devices you are having trouble with, we'll have no way to improve the situation. Please try to get device time, software firmware version, etc. So unless we get better information, this report will be doomed to become useless, other than as a vague: "someone has some sort of trouble somewhere".

We'll add a way to explicitly turn off the mesh for a future release.

[mbletsas]

Please don't blame the mesh if you don't know what the root cause is....

M.

[Phil]

I am not personally "blaming" anything; as one of the OLPC support volunteers, I was simply stating behaviour that I have seen multiple users, on both IRC and in RT tickets, report. Other laptops will occasionally freak out when an XO-1 is nearby, and turning off the 'msh0' device often seems to fix the problem. As I'm not a low-level kernel device hacker, I can't currently know what the root cause is; please retag and rename the bug if you think I put it in the wrong place.

[jg]

Please try hard to get more specific information about the affected devices.

The mesh may or may not have anything to do with problems people have...

[Phil]

This is a duplicate of #5144; closing. Sorry for the confusion I caused.