Comment 97 for bug 291760

I can confirm this problem across several models of Dell Laptop, across several brands of wireless NIC. The same behavior is exhibited on Karmic and the Lucid RC. Hence, this is likely not a driver problem.

The problem manifests itself by constant disconnects at random times with similar messages related to roaming from "none".

Also, our specific wireless deployment works properly for the same hardware platforms (Mostly various dell laptops), running WIndows XP and Fedora Core 12. OSX also works. Thus, RF and configuration issues of the wireless infrastructure are not likely.

This particular deployment uses a Cisco 5508 Wireless LAN Controller with 1142 Access Points, configured with sane defaults for most things.

Users authenticate via WPA2 / Enterprise, AES+TKIP, 802.1X

Version information of Fedora Core 12 is being provided as a reference for a configuration that does work properly with Network-Manager:
Network Manager: 0.7.998-2.git20100106.fc12.x86_64
Netowrk Manager Gnome: 0.7.998-2.git20100106.fc12.x86_64
wpa_supplicant: 0.6.8-8.fc12.x86_64
kernel: 2.6.32.11-99.fc12.x86_64

Working around this issue involves simply not using Network-Manager, and setting up wpa_supplicant manually on Debian/Ubuntu.

This issue seems to have lingered for quite some time, and it seems that several other seemingly related issues may be making addressing this problem more difficult.

It does, however, impact the usability of wireless in a very serious way, and seems to apply to a fairly diverse set of hardware.

I am tempted to speculate that this issue may be more common for people using enterprise authentication, possibly explaining why it hasn't been caught/isolated and addressed earlier.

Please let me know if there are any specifics I can provide beyond what's here.

Many Thanks!