Wireless network settings lost on Oneiric upgrade

[Tim Pederick]

Release: during upgrade from Kubuntu 11.04 to 11.10

Package: Reported against update-manager because that's what the "had a bug during upgrade" instructions say to do. For all I know the problem could be in KDE's network manager.

Expected: Upgrading to Oneiric will retain (or migrate) wireless network settings. If the network has to go down for any reason, "installer" packages will download their extra files while the network is up.

Observed: The wireless network went down. This caused all manner of alarming, if harmless, errors when certain packages that needed a network connection failed to get it. Upon reboot, I found that the problem was that my wireless network settings had been lost entirely. They still existed in KWallet, but I had to reenter them myself (and I noticed that the format in the wallet was different to before). After doing this, apt-get -f fixed the problem packages.

The packages that needed a network connection were:
 * firmware-b43-lpphy-installer
 * flashplugin-downloader
 * flashplugin-installer

Workaround: Presumably, having a non-wireless network connection would avoid the install problems.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: update-manager (not installed)
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-12.20-generic 3.0.4
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-12-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: fglrx wl
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu3
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Oct 14 13:26:47 2011
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationMedia: Kubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - Release amd64 (20101007)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_AU.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: update-manager
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-10-13 (0 days ago)

[Alex (d-f0rce)]

I'm commenting on this bug and not on #859373 as 859373 is mainly about the network not being available while upgrading.

I was not affected by the upgrade bug, however I also lost all my wireless and VPN settings in the KDE network manager. So this should be treated as a different problem and not marked as a duplicate of #859373.

[Tim Pederick (pederick)]

> So this should be treated as a different problem and not marked as a
> duplicate of #859373.

Not surprisingly, I agree. Only half of this bug report (the side effects of losing the network) duplicates #859373. Over there at the moment, they're tossing around a fix for an obsolete network policy being deleted too early, or some such. I don't pretend to fully understand the issue, but it sure sounds like "yes, we're scrapping your old network settings, we just need to do it a little bit later than we have been". If that's the case, the old network settings need to be migrated to the new setup, and that's the half of this bug that's gone unaddressed.

If that's NOT the case, then there's some other reason why network settings are being lost, and that's still the half of this bug that's gone unaddressed. ;-)

[dusoft (dusoft-staznosti)]

I confirm. I have just updated Kubuntu from 11.04 to 11.10 and every settings in knetworkmanager has been forgotten. No wifi networks, I used to connect to, no monile broadband etc. Shameful.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[dusoft (dusoft-staznosti)]

This is certainly not a duplicate of bug #859373. Please, remove that!