no internet connection with Fedora16

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Saturday 14 January 2012 15:11:00 Timothy Murphy wrote:
> I haven't understood what problem, precisely, you would have
> if you were not using NM?

Suppose you have a laptop and a desktop on your local LAN. Desktop is normally 
on a wired connection, while the laptop is normally on wifi. Then at some point 
you want to move a large quantity of data between the two machines as fast as 
possible --- most wireless cards are still 10 times slower than the wire, so 
you plug the ethernet cable into the laptop.

And then --- the wire doesn't Just Work. You need to open a terminal, become 
root, run "service network restart" (or "ifup eth0" or click on some button in 
some GUI, or whatever...) to get the wire operational, in addition to 
disabling wireless and/or explaining the system to start routing through eth0 
rather than through wlan0. Also, what if it isn't your laptop and you don't 
have the credentials (ie. root password or sudo config) to activate eth0 
manually?

OTOH, when using NM, you plug in the wire, and it Just Works --- NM 
reconfigures everything for you and the wire is functional almost immediately, 
without any user intervention whatsoever.

It's just simpler for the end user --- the "just plug it in" philosophy is 
what most of ordinary (non-geek) people expect.

> What difference would it make if you did name a different DNS server?

Sometimes the default DNS server is unresponsive, slow, down, poisoned, or 
otherwise broken somehow (in some LANs it is even nonexistent, 
unbelivable...). In those cases (which are rare, but do happen here and there) 
I often reconfigure my machine to use one of the google's DNS servers, 8.8.8.8 
--- it's easy enough to remember, and I trust that it is always operational 
and well-maintained... ;-)

> It may surprise you to learn that NM does not work for many people
> in certain situations;
> so any system that assumes NM is running is just going to cause problems.

This is true, no app should rely on NM specifically. But if an app needs 
Internet access, it is going to assume that it has it, regardless of whether 
it is provided by NM or the network service.

The only "real problem" I've had with NM is when I need remote access to a 
computer while nobody is logged in atm. For example, if I want to ssh into my 
laptop from a remote location, the laptop is usually not connected to any wifi 
network if no user is logged on locally. But I bet even this can be configured 
nowdays, if I would need it often enough... ;-)

HTH, :-)
Marko