you can already do this, using /etc/rc.d/network to try all profiles. slower, but far more reliable than this setup.

iwlist is buggy for some cards, sometimes will not report available networks and doesnt list networks which do not advertise essid.

netcfg is internally undergoing a rewrite and included in this, is better detection support.

this patch was written against the current netcfg scripts pre-release, 0.1.99, the "rewrite" as it were. I made the patch for apeiro, but since I couldn't locate him, it was suggested to post it here. as for iwlist and it's unreliability, that can be resolved in a few ways:

first of all, autodetection is never 100%, but it always works better than none does

second: if the profiles were modified slightly to include an optional MAC address for networks without ESSID broadcast, that could be resolved, as well as a flag for AUTODETECT=1 and AUTODETECT_METHOD=MAC, ESSID etc.

iwlist is greatly more reliable on listing all available networks when you sleep 1 second before bringing it up.

The reason I chose to submit a version with an iwlist for EACH profile instead of once, or for each device is because some people have multiple cards for A, B/G, and N/M networks. I felt that to match any available MAC/ESSID against profiles would result in inconvenience to those people, and that a working version for everyone was better than a fast version for most, however that could be provided as well, or easily modified.

loading all network profiles results in alot of errors or malfunctions when you have multiple DHCP profiles in the area. they result in hanging on DHCP attempts, which the last time I had that occur, it took 60 seconds before it timed out. most cards result in no error when issuing IW commands if the AP doesn't exist and will associate without error.

Most cards DO work with IWLIST, however, it does have it's minor issues which could be easily worked around.

I still feel this is a valuable contribution, and would be much obliged if you could take this further information into consideration.

this will be included in the new scripts, which will have support for both the iwlist, and dhcp detections, with iwlist enabled by default under the name FAST_SCAN or something like that.

James