2012-09-19 - Re: [GRASE-Hotspot] Weird network problem

Header Data

From: Timothy White <ti***8@gmail.com>
Message Hash: 687ac16027d9d800f5b8cb468b4c4240caac812971650960abcdcb79345f4d4b
Message ID: <CAESLx0+rqd+s1xVKGUUWYx020=1uEF43jcsdn0RTObYfSh_9EQ@mail.gmail.com>
Reply To: <201209181950.23310.solbu@solbu.net>
UTC Datetime: 2012-09-19 14:22:55 UTC
Raw Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2012 07:22:55 +1000

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On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 3:50 AM, Johnny Solbu <so***u@solbu.net> wrote:
> On Monday 17 September 2012 22:31, Timothy White wrote:
>> Make sure you hit save even if they match
>
> Hmm. Weird that worked.  But why the need to save if we're not changing anything?
> Seriusly, this /will/ bite someone else in the ass in the future, also.
>
>> and then reboot.
>
> No need to reboot. Reloading chilli is enough. (/etc/init.d/chilli reload)

The reason is that the GUI currently only lets the real WAN interface
be selected. At some point in your NIC changeover, the WAN nic changed
names, and so coova chilli had problems starting (or the LAN nic,
ether or). The problem is that we can't autodetect it, because we
can't ensure it's always active when we try to detect it. It used to
be autodetected, which caused other problems.
So the solution was to allow it to be saved as a setting, but only
allowing a real WAN interface to be saved. The problem then arises
that when the WAN interface changes, when you load the settings it
redetects the real WAN interface, and doesn't show you that the saved
settings are different to the detected settings. So the saving is
actually changing saved settings. I need to work out a way to make
this clearer that the setting has changed and needs to be saved (but
we don't automatically save it, because it could be a temporary thing
that the WAN has changed and we don't want to break things
automatically!)

As for the reboot, it depends if the LAN nic had changed. If the LAN
nic changes, coova chilli can still be running on the old setting, and
then restarting chilli starts a second instance on the new nic. This
can cause problems if the old lan NIC was the WAN nic. Confusing, but
another niggle with coova chilli that I can't work out the best way to
handle, because it is a legitimate use case to have multiple coova
chillis running, so we can't just kill it because we think it might be
our instance.

Input into how to best handle this is welcomed, in particular GUI improvements.

Tim

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