NetworkManager: A User's Review

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 26 April 2006 10:28, Charles Curley wrote:
>What I do for wireless networking is a kludge of the first water.
>
>I use "service network restart" for my home network. It is set up with
>WEP using 64 bit (10 hex digit) keys and does not broadcast its
>SSID. I cannot access my home network with NetworkManager (hereafter
>NM). However, I can use NM to get on a local open network. So I find
>myself toggling between those two tools.
>
>NM's documentation is pathetic. Such documentation as exists is on the
>NM web site, making it rather useless if you're trying to access the
>net somewhere. (When else would the ordinary user care to see NM
>documentation?)
>
>The prompts are useless to those who are not wireless network
>gurus. To give a trivial example, when entering a WEP key as a hex
>value, do I enter a leading 0x or not? Kwifimanager, by the way,
>qualifies WEP keys as you enter them, one keystroke at a time, so that
>it is obvious when you have entered a valid key and when you have not.
>
>If the target user for NM is the wireless illiterate, the implementers
>should design the prompts for the wireless illiterate, not for
>themselves. The way to do this is get several wireless illiterates to
>attempt to make multiple connections. Encourage the testers to ask
>questions. The answer to each and every question the testers asks
>should be put -- in simple language -- into the GUI where the user can
>find it.
>
>NM makes no effort to preserve attempted logon data across tries. If
>your attempt fails, and you want to try different things, you have to
>stop the daemon, restart it, then retype everything, not just the
>changes. This is the sort of inane user-hostile stupidity one expects
>of a Vogon.
>
>Because of these idiocies, I've given up trying to use NM on my home
>network. NM is very nice when it works. You fire it up (you shouldn't
>even have to do that; you should be able to leave it running), and it
>connects, even to a network it's never seen before. But when human
>intervention is required (such as entering a WEP key), it is user
>hostile to the point of uselessness.

I couldn't have said it any better without descending into the 4 letter 
words category myself, something I do all too easily.

I have a home wireless network working nicely here, with a small dhcp 
server running, so I thought I'd see what the diffs might be between an 
iwconfig output as setup by a "service network start", and shutting it 
down and using NM, where a network start connects, and NM does not.

The single difference I can see is that when NM has tried to make wlan0 
work, its trying to do so without a key.  Stop it, restart network and 
the use of the WEP key is restored along with the connectivity.

Those little one paragraph man pages are at best useless.  The key file 
exists, albeit via a link from keys-wlan0 to keys-wlan0-home, and 
making it a direct copy with 0600 perms makes no difference.

I've got about 3 days left to make this work or I'll be in solitary 
confinement for 2 months while I'm out on a job. or running XP which in 
this area, just works.  FWIW, at the tv station today, which I spent 2 
hours re-entering keys at today without making a connection, and which 
did work 2 weeks ago almost OOTB, I checked with XP booted, XP 
remembered the key from the last time 2 weeks ago, and connected in 
about 1/2 seconds total elapsed time.

I looked in /etc/NetworkManager/dispacher.d but there are only 2 files 
in there, a firestarter, and one for ntpd.

Now I think NM might actually work if it would use the keys, why isn't 
it using the keys-wlan0 thats there in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts?

Yup, $65K question that.  Anybody have a clue?  I sure don't.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.