How does Fedora want "ordinary people" to manage mobile network computing

[Erik Hemdal]

> From: Joel Jaeggli <joelja at darkwing.uoregon.edu>
> On Mon, 24 Apr 2006, Paul Johnson wrote:
> 
> > I'm an "old hand" at Linux, and am able to make my wired & wireless 
> > connections work, but only with some difficulty.  Yesterday 
> I helped a 
> > young lady install linux on a laptop and found it darned-near 
> > impossible to explain to her how she is supposed to handle 
> the problem 
> > of going for place-to-place, using different wired and wireless 
> > networks.  So I wondered if the Gnome or KDE folks had worked this 
> > out.
> > I have never figured out how "profiles" are supposed to simplify this.
> 
> Profiles allow you to lump settings for multiple devices 
> together, as well as use the same names for each device with 
> a different configuration under each profile. so profiles are 
> in fact exactly what you want.
> 

Now that Prof. Johnson has brought this up, here's another query on just how
profiles are supposed to work.  For my part, I have always had similar
difficulties.  I commonly find that setting up network profiles in
system-config-network fails even for hardwired network connections.  In
general I find that DNS settings are not reset when I move between profiles,
and as Prof. Johnson notes, the default gateway can also go awry.  Sometimes
the profile sticks with my "work" static IP address and fails to change to
DHCP when I switch to my "school" profile.  I've found ways of avoiding the
worst kinds of problems, but not by getting everything to work flawlessly.

I don't usually have to go into /etc/sysconfig, but I do have to manually
change IP and DNS and bounce interfaces.  I have had to since FC1 on all
machines I've tried.  I chalked it up to either 1) having too many networks
to switch between (my record is four) 2) my doing something stupid, or 2)
profiles just being broken,but in a way that has some workaround that I just
never found.

Any pointer on how profiles are supposed to work would be a benefit.

> >
> > While trying to describe this to the new linux user, I was 
> struck by 
> > how crappy it is. 

I'm not prepared to go this far, because I tend to assume I've either done
something dumb here or just missed something in the flood of list posts.
Still and all, Prof. Johnson isn't alone in seeing anomalies with profiles.

Erik