NetworkManager: a tale of two laptops

[Timothy Murphy]

John W. Linville wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 04, 2008 at 02:00:44PM +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
>> I have two laptops, elizabeth and mary,
>> with identical PCMCIA WiFi cards, Orinoco Gold (firmware 6.04).
>> 
>> I have two APs, with ESSIDs (say) wrt and agere.
>> 
>> NM (NetworkManager) works fine on mary,
>> linking always to wrt on eth1.
>> 
>> NM never works on elizabeth,
>> trying for some reason to link to agere on eth1.
>> 
>> "service network" links elizabeth to agere on eth2.
> 
> Did you mean to say eth2 here?  Or still on eth1?
>  
>> So WiFi works perfectly on both machines,
>> but NM works only on one.
>> 
>> I have compared all the files I can think of,
>> and see no difference between the laptops.
>> 
>> I do not know where NM keeps the information it uses
>> on networks.
>> I would like to tell it to try to link to wrt on elizabeth,
>> but as I say do not know where it keeps this preference.

> I really don't understand the question.  Why don't you just login on
> elizabeth, click on the NM applet icon, and select wrt?

I'm on elizabeth now.

1. I am not offered wrt when I click on the NM applet.
If I choose "Connect to Other Wireless Network"
and enter "Network Name: wrt", 
"Wireless Security: WEP 40/128-bit Hexadecimal",
and then give the 10 hexadecimal digit key,
the "windmill" rotates for some time,
and then ...
I'll continue the story later, as I shall have to break the connection
(established with "service network restart").