Is NetworkManager working for you?

[Timothy Murphy]

I'm running NetworkManager (NM) under Fedora-6 with KDE,
but am not entirely happy with it,
and I'm wondering what the general experience
of Fedora/KDE users is with NM?

What worries me is that NM is completely unpredictable,
in my experience.
This morning, for instance, on re-booting my ThinkPad laptop
NetworkManager said it was connected to my Linksys WRT54GL access point,
but in fact I could not access my WiFi LAN.

I have tried running "service NetworkManager restart"
but that has never succeeded when NetworkManager has failed.
In fact it seems to send my PCMCIA Orinoco Gold WiFi card
into a state of complete stupor,
with the main light on the card (showing it is working)
turned off.

NetworkManager does have some advantages over the basic
Fedora wireless network setup,
which I also found extremely unsatisfactory.
In particular the profile setup never worked for me.

But I'm wondering whether to persist with NM,
or to try to get some other WiFi software working.
(Someone mentioned wifi-radar -
I don't know if there is anything else.)

The WiFi setup under Fedora is really appallingly bad.
There is no proper documentation,
and such Help files as are provided seem completely useless.

[Genes MailLists]

On Sunday 24 December 2006 09:26, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> I'm running NetworkManager (NM) under Fedora-6 with KDE,
> but am not entirely happy with it,

Ditto - what I suspect we need is something like IBM's access connections 
(on windows - yes I know) - its outstanding.

I move my laptop between wired, wireless, static and dhcp, at work at 
several locations and at home as well as on the road (hotels, t-mobile and so 
on). I found NM lacking in my situation when I last tried (i have not looked 
at the latest version - maybe it can handle all this  now)

My solution was to create a little sudo script to setup what I need then I 
bound them to a KDE little slider panel. Click panel - it opens i click icon 
for my location and it runs the script <location> - wired or wireless. Script 
updates resolv.conf, network settings and keys, DNS (if neeeded), ntp, 
sendmail etc. The scripts map the name given as an argument to a directory 
and uses whatever is in there - resolv.conf, ifcfg-eth0 etc. So quite easy to 
add new location info.

This is simple and works for me. But  I concur it would be nice to have 
something that is easy to set up out of the box and gives you control to set 
up the things that need changing - without having to know where to put 
keys.eth1 and so on.

Best of luck.

g/

[Rex Dieter]

Timothy Murphy wrote:
> I'm running NetworkManager (NM) under Fedora-6 with KDE,
> but am not entirely happy with it,
> and I'm wondering what the general experience
> of Fedora/KDE users is with NM?

WORKSFORME, but I (generally) use knetworkmanager (instead of
NetworkManager-gnome, aka nm-applet).

Much also depends on your wireless chipset/driver.

-- Rex

[Timothy Murphy]

Rex Dieter wrote:
> > I'm running NetworkManager (NM) under Fedora-6 with KDE,
> > but am not entirely happy with it,
> > and I'm wondering what the general experience
> > of Fedora/KDE users is with NM?
>
> WORKSFORME, but I (generally) use knetworkmanager (instead of
> NetworkManager-gnome, aka nm-applet).
>
> Much also depends on your wireless chipset/driver.

In brief, I have two WiFi LANs in my house;
and this seems to confuse NM.
If I try to change from one to the other
NM loses all knowledge of both,
and I have to re-boot to get any connection.

Actually, I have found that taking out my PCMCIA WiFi card
and re-inserting it seems to do almost as well as re-booting.

[There used to be a "service pcmcia" under Fedora,
but that seems to have disappeared.]

With my present understanding of NM,
I would give it beta minus,
while I would give the standard system-config-network delta,
as I cannot understand what it is trying to do (eg with profiles),
and it definitely does not seem to be doing anything sensible.

[Aaron Konstam]

On Mon, 2006-12-25 at 17:18 +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> In brief, I have two WiFi LANs in my house;
> and this seems to confuse NM.
> If I try to change from one to the other
> NM loses all knowledge of both,
> and I have to re-boot to get any connection.

This is interesting. It must be hardware dependent, since when I ma in
my office there are three or ofur different access points active. I use
only two of them but seem to have not problem switxhing between them.