On Thu, 27 Apr 2006, Rob Andrews wrote:
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@xxxxxxxxx (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.
This sounds like a bug, maybe in initscripts. NM isn't really designed for headless machines living in a relatively static environment. The traditional scripts should do the right thing. Bugzilla is probably the best place to get this looked at.
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.
IIRC, supporting simultaneous interfaces in NM is on the TODO list.
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"?
It shouldn't be, as I said above. -- Matthew Saltzman Clemson University Math Sciences mjs AT clemson DOT edu http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs
