NetworkManager update

[Rob Andrews]

On 27-Apr-2006 14:43.49 (BST), Matthew Saltzman wrote:
 > (4) For real help with NM, send your issues to the developers' list, 
 > networkmanager-list at gnome.org (subscribe at http://mail.gnome.org).  For 
 > real bugs, file them in Fedora's Bugzilla.  The goal of NM is to make 
 > managing connections to multiple networks painless.  If it isn't quite 
 > there yet, the developers can use all the help you can provide.

I haven't posted regarding my gripe with NetworkManager yet, but since
it's not a bug with NetworkManager itself it doesn't really fit on the
developers list.

My machines are all wirelessly connected and use WPA. Most of them are
headless, so I don't have the cute GNOME system tray icon to select and
switch my network. I would have assumed that I could craft a solution
that didn't require me to login to activate WPA with the wpa_supplicant
and network-scripts, but they seem to be blissfully ignorant of each
other. Enough so that network startup is priority 10 and wpa_supplicant
defaults to priority 12. So I don't get networking without having to
manually prod it.

I guess my solution is to craft an init script to daemonise wpa_cli
after starting wpa_supplicant and ifup/ifdown upon (dis)association with
the wireless network, then set ONBOOT=no for the wireless interfaces.

Secondly, on hosts with wired and wireless adapters (I have some machines
with crossover links to each other) NetworkManager gives me the choice of
having one port or the other active, but not both. Again, if I set
static interface information for one interface, then bring the other up
when NetworkManager reads my network key from the keyring upon login,
then the wired interface gets shut down.

It seems to me that for both these situations, NetworkManager really
isn't the solution for WPA, but no provision is made to allow
wpa_supplicant to cooperate nicely with the current network scripts.

Is there a plan to rectify this, or is the future response to all WPA
questions "NetworkManager"?

-- 
rob                               :: pgp 0xb35ff721 :: rob at choralone.org