Start wpa_supplicant before network

[mattcen]

Hi all,

From what I could find in my searches, this question hasn't been asked before (though I may have been using the wrong keywords). I have my wireless network card on my laptop up and running, and both the network and wpa_supplicant services are set to start up at boot time.
The trouble is that wpa_supplicant starts up after network, so that if I have my wlan0 set to start automatically, it sits there for ages trying to connect, and eventually failing, because it can't connect without wpa_supplicant.
Is there any way that I can rearrange the order in which these two services start up?

Kind regards,
Mattcen

[scottro]

Well, some of us consider it a bug, but the developers don't.

See http://home.nyc.rr.com/computertaijutsu/rhwireless.html which goes through it. In a nutshell, let it do its thing and in rc.local put in /bin/sleep 1
/sbin/dhclient wlan0 (or whatever your card is.)

The page above has a link to the bug report (at one point, there was a serious problem where wpa started before message bus which made wpa fail.) It also has a link to an excellent howto by a gentleman named Mike.

So, you're not the only one who found this, but it seems most people rely on the GUI NetworkManager, which is probably (IMHO) one reason there's been less of an outcry.

[mattcen]

Thank you so much for such a prompt reply!
Believe it or not, I have never edited /etc/rc.local before as having not looked much into startup scripts, I didn't know it existed. Now that I do I'm sure it will come in rather handy .
In any case, placing those commands into the /etc/rc.local worked like a charm (and why shouldn't it?).
It is true that most people seem to use NetworkManager for their wireless, which is all well and good (most of my experiences with NetworkManager have been very straight forward and user friendly), unless of course you want to access your computer from the network without having logged in , in which case you have a bit of a problem!

Thanks alot again for your help!

Sincerely,
Mattcen

[scottro]

Glad it helped. I tend to prefer command line, one reason I never made much use of NetworkManager. Re your sig, Ubuntu's Hardy Heron is in alpha, you might as well wait.

[mattcen]

Thanks for the suggestion scottro, but I already have Ubuntu 7.10 (got it off a PC Magazine ) and it's apparently supported until next year.
I figure I've got plenty of time to download Hardy Heron before then, and it's not going to be a problem formatting - I'm mainly installing it to get the feel for it, in particular the package management system (apt, synaptic etc) but also the other differences between Debian and Redhat based distros.
What is really going to get me is when Fedora 9 comes out! I have taken to downloading the whole Everything and Updates repositories for those, as I install it on so many computers several of them virtual). That is going to hurt my download limit! oh well.

Thanks again,
Mattcen