Re: NetworkManager: A User's Review

Gene Heskett wrote:

On Thursday 27 April 2006 02:12, Dan wrote:

Gene Heskett wrote:

On Wednesday 26 April 2006 20:00, Charles Curley wrote:

On Wed, Apr 26, 2006 at 06:01:00PM -0500, Paul Johnson wrote:

I asked about wireless support in this list a couple of days ago
and people pointed me at NetworkManager.  It was not running on my
system, perhaps because my system was installed with FC3 and then
upgraded to FC4 and FC5, so new services were not activated as
they would be in a fresh install.

My experience is mixed.

For the wired and non-encrypted wireless, it seems to be fine.
HOwever, for the networks that require a WEP key, I can't log in
with it. When I try with NM, it asks me for a WEP passphrase and
it asks if I am in an "open network" or "shared network".   I
don't know what those mean, but I've tried all combinations and it
does not log in.

On the other hand, with the key saved in
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts, the home network does come up,
either from the command line:

/sbin/ifup home

or inside system-config-network.

Can NetworkManager be made to read the WEP key as it is already
set by system-config-network?

This sounds suspiciouly like my experience until now. What I just
discovered is that NM does not like or play with 64 bit WEP keys.
You must use 128 bit WEP keys. You might check your AP for the size
of the keys.

Mine are all 128 bit, it simply ignores them.

You two seem to be having lots of trouble with NM, so I'd just like to
put it out there: works for me. No configuration in
system-config-network, any scripts, or anything, just a clean FC5
install, installed the ipw2200 driver, configured NM/NMDispatcher

Unforch, it seems the ipw2200 driver is much more mature. But does it work with broadcom 4318 radio's

services to start on start, and network to not, rebooted. Clicked the
nm-applet icon, connect to other network, entered WEP key (I've used
both 128 and 64 bit keys in both hex and ASCII versions, all work
fine), connect.

NetworkManager has never asked me for a key.  Not once.

The first time it took a long time but after that, what you'd expect, 5-10 seconds. I tried WPA once and it didnt work,

but I think that's not exactly a NM issue, I didn't have the
motivation to look into that. I usually just connect to my WEP router
with a wire anyway, and the wireless network i connect to just has a
VPN. This also works flawlessly by the way, with NetworkManager-vpnc.
NM doesn't read any keys set up for network, it stores them itself
when you enter them in its dialogs. It does however read settings for
static IP and such from network.

Shared keys were originally intended to be a more secure way to
initiate connection with a WEP-protected access point, as the key
needs to be validated before a client can even connect, however this
actually makes it less secure, as the key can (theoretically) be
reverse engineered from the router's challenge broadcast. So open
authentication is recommended, and I believe it is the one NM is
intended to work with. There is definitely a lack of documentation
for NM, but thats probably because its a very simple GUI program
designed to "just work" and doesn't have a lot of advanced features
to document. I'm sure it will get better with time. I hope somehow
you two can get it working eventually, it's really very nice when it
works :).
-Dan

This broadcom radio works well also, when set for fixed addresses, known keys and matching ESSID's. But the discovery of a lan out in the field is very difficult when you've NDI what the key is. Between that and no dhcpd action when its configured to use it, its very damned discouraging. I did find some updated NetworkManager stuffs on updates-testing and installed tonight them but it made no diff, it still doesn't use the keys-wlan0 file thats there for it to use, nor does it ask me for a key.

-Dan