My phone always requests an internet connection on boot (I have "connect automatically" set to "always ask"). It's really annoying and I can't seem to make it stop. It didn't used to do this, so I assume I've accidentally misconfigured something somewhere, or installed some obnoxious program that's doing this, but I'm having a lot of trouble diagnosing it. Does anyone have any thoughts about what could be causing this or how I can nail the culprit?

just flash it. just save your data first.

Clever.

But I've got a lot of custom configuration I'd like to preserve, and it may be that it's something in that custom configuration that's causing the problem, so I'd really rather not go through the whole-day exercise of rebuilding my config from scratch only to find out that the problem is still there.

Also, my USB port is broken, and I'm not sure I even know how to flash without the USB port. I really need to find myself a proper repair shop that will actually fix such things, as I don't have the manual dexterity to do that repair myself.

Have you tried to check your settings using Configuration Editor?

It should be configured like this:

Or instead of making people to start suggesting all the hairy stuff one could do with the N900, you could simply give some info about your setup and customization you are so desperate to prevent changing, please.
What are those???
Which widgets, daemons or custom scripts do you have enabled or running at boot, try to debug, which might actually need some data from the web.

Update: I just realized that the Configuration Editor is gconf-editor, which I'd meant to try out before but forgotten about. Upon examining the settings dzano mentions, I discovered that change_while_connected was checked and search_interval was 600, so I changed those to unchecked and 0 as shown in the image. However, this doesn't seem to have fixed the problem.

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dzano,

I haven't seen that "Configuration Editor" tool before. Is it a separate package I need to install (and if so, what's the package name/repository), or is it something that's already on the system by default (and if so, how do I run it)?

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michaaa62,

I didn't start listing my system configuration because (a) there's a lot to it and I'm not sure I even remember everything I've done and (b) I wasn't entirely certain what info would be most useful for people to hear. I've tried most of the basic things I know about, spent a lot of time blindly poking through my user's dotdirs, the /etc directory, and the gconf repository trying to make sense of it all, and thrown uncountably many search terms at the forums and google, all to no effect, so, quite honestly, I'm *looking* for hairier, more obscure suggestions.

I don't really expect y'all to diagnose my problem for me, I'm just hoping somebody might be able to point me to methods that *I* can use to diagnose it, e.g. how to determine what exactly is being run at startup, ways to view relevant settings (such as this "Configuration Editor" tool dzano mentioned), or information about what files this stuff is likely to be stored in. It seemed to me that this might be more efficient than me trying to remember everything I've ever done to the machine over the past 3+ years and regurgitating it all in a disorganized haystack for people to sort through looking for needles.

But here are a couple things that I can think of that may or may not be relevant.:

(a) I have a desktop activity in actman called "Clear", which has 1 desktop view with no widgets or shortcuts or contacts, and the problem still occurs even with that activity selected. I even very carefully saved the activity with the internet turned off, just in case it was somehow saving that status, and it made no difference.

(b) My USB port is broken, so I swap batteries a lot, and in order to stop it from resetting the stupid "24-hour clock" and "Update automatically" settings for the clock and making me click through the settings wizard on every single goddamn battery swap, I created the empty file /var/dont_start_suw to stop the /etc/X11/Xsession.d/30osso_startup_wizard script from running. However, removing the dont_start_suw file doesn't seem to make the problem go away, so I'm not sure this has anything to do with it, even though I did first create the file right around when the problems started.

(c) I have a few extra things like camera lens launcher, phone speakers switcher, shortcutd, tweakr, FM Carkit, and CSSU Features installed, but nothing that ought to be demanding access to the internet on boot. Same goes for most of my other configuration tweaks --- they've got no clear relationship to networking.

(d) I do have some IM accounts configured --- skype, gmail, and facebook chat --- but they were installed for years without incident before this problem occurred. Same goes for my Mail for Exchange sync with my Google calendar.

Basically I'm asking for help in this fashion because I'm at a complete loss to determine what could be at fault, so I don't even know what to tell you about my configuration that might be helpful for solving this. All my ideas along those lines have so far been dead ends. I'm sorry if this is frustrating, but I will try to provide any specific info that's asked for.

I had similar problem with this app. After uninstall, everything is back to normal.

Towards b)
Did you by any chance do have the clock pull its time and date from the internet? While your custom script did prevent the manual setting first, there might be an essential setting missing

May be the update interval for HildonApplicationManager is set strangely? You might also use gconf-editor to look for that setting or the gconftool2 tool in X-Terminal.

Heh, dzano. I don't have accuweather installed, but it's interesting to know that it played this game too. OMWeather, on the other hand, is on one of my non-clear actman profiles, but even with it absent, I still get the problem behavior.

Uninstalling and reinstalling actman, however, is a different story. No actman = no problem, even for the same desktop configurations that have a problem when actman is present. Looking through the contents of the .activities directory, and especially those stored for my "Clear" profile, I don't see any obvious problems, but clearly actman is doing *something* I don't want it to. Anyone have any thoughts on where else to look or what to look for in .activities?

Updated to add: I should also mention that I don't have any actman scripts set up. All I did was install actman and save a few different desktop activities, nothing fancy or exotic. And shoving aside the .activities directory into a temporary backup location didn't seem to help.

michaaa62,

The clock just gets its info from the cell phone net. I don't have ntpd or anything like that installed because I don't leave the internet connection on most of the time, in order to save battery. I don't even really have a custom script to do this --- I literally just created an empty file called /var/dont_start_suw --- that 30osso_startup_wizard dealie (which is part of the default OS and normally runs the annoying dialogue and mucks up all my settings after I replace the battery) checks if that file is there and doesn't run if it is.

I checked the update interval for HAM as you suggested, and it was set to 1440, which is maybe a little shorter than it should be in these post-Nokia days, but not absurdly short. I tried setting it to 100000 as you suggested, but that didn't matter. I think my money is on actman doing something weird at this point, given the observation I reported in my previous comment.