NetworkManager "forget" user network configurations: bug or feature?

[Dan Williams]

On Tue, 2014-03-25 at 16:53 -0300, Sergio Belkin wrote:
> 2014-03-25 16:20 GMT-03:00 Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com>:
> 
> > On Tue, 2014-03-25 at 16:19 -0300, Sergio Belkin wrote:
> > > Hi Fedora folks,
> > >
> > > Since NetworkManager I suffer the same issue, release after release, ok,
> > > it's not a Fedora issue
> > >
> > > If I preserve the home partition and perform a newly installation, eg
> > > f19->f20 NetworkManager configurations per user are lost. I think that
> > > NM should respect the user settings and not "happily" send them to trash.
> > >
> > > But what do you think? What is the rationale of saving user
> > > configurations in the /etc directory?
> > >
> > > What do you think?
> >
> > Um. Are you sure this is what is happening? Are you sure these aren't
> > set as systemwide connections?
> > --
> > Adam Williamson
> > Fedora QA Community Monkey
> > IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
> > http://www.happyassassin.net
> >
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> 
> 
> 
> Adam,
> 
> I've found that by default when I create a user, the checkbox in
> NetworkManager that says
> 
> "All users may connect to this network" is checked!
> 
> If I uncheck anyway the network configuration files are in
> /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/
> 
> Really I don't understand this behavior (using mate-desktop on F20)

No matter how that box is checked, the connection configuration will
always be in either /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/ (WWAN,
Bluetooth, VPN, etc) or in standard ifcfg files
in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ (everything else).  They do not
switch around between these directories.

What *is* affected per-user is passwords, like VPN passwords and WiFi
passphrases/keys.  Since these are stored in the user's session keyring,
they will be wiped out if the user's data is deleted.  But
NetworkManager should simply ask for the password the next time.

Also, by default, VPN connections are locked to the specific user that
created them.  This means that if you change usernames, the connection
will no longer be visible to your new user.  You can update the
connection by editing the file directly though.

To debug your issue, what do you get when you run:

sudo nmcli con

?

Dan