BOINC again !? -- BINGO, BINGO and BINGO

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Thu, 2008-07-03 at 16:40 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> 
> >> Sorry, Rahul, you have lost me here.
> >> When I say that NM waits until the user logs in
> >> I mean that NetworkManager does not connect me to my AP
> >> until I login.
> > 
> > Again, you are confusing between NM and nm-applet.
> 
> I don't think so.
> I am using the term NetworkManager - as I think most people do -
> to mean "NM and any associated programs which it may start".
> 
> >> Therefore any application that requires me to be connected
> >> has to wait until I login.
> >> This doesn't worry me particularly, but it does puzzle me.
> >> 
> >> I am asking the reason for this delay.
> > 
> > I believe I already answered that. NM was initially designed to manage
> > wireless networks easily where it makes more sense to connect after you
> > login. Refer
> > 
> > http://www.redhat.com/magazine/003jan05/features/networkmanager/
> 
> Thanks for that reference, which looks pretty good at a quick first glance.
> 
> I guess I start from a different point to yourself and the NM developer(s).
> I and my family use WiFi on laptops in my house,
> to connect to the desktop connected to the internet.
> Occasionally I try to access the internet from a WiFi "hotspot"
> but my experience in Ireland is that this is rarely as simple as it sounds.
> (Last time I tried in a pub here it turned out that they wanted me to pay
> the equivalent of several pints of beer.)
> But 99% of the time we are using laptops to connect to a fixed AP.
> 
> In other words, for me WiFi is simply a replacement for ethernet.
> I suspect that is the case for a large majority of WiFi users.
> 
> In fact, for people like me - which as I say I suspect is most users -
> the standard network service would be fine if it worked.
> It used to work reasonably well under Redhat-9 (and earlier)
> but it has never worked properly under Fedora, for me.
> 
> But it seems to me that it should be easy enough to cater for all users,
> by having a setting in some /etc/NM.conf which will allow NM to start
> with a specific connection before anyone logs in
> _if that is what one wants_,
> or if not requires the user to authenticate before connection.


http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/F9Common#networkmanager-static


> >> Perhaps if there was some minimal documentation for NM this might be
> >> clear.
> > 
> > Perhaps if you will volunteer to contribute, it would have been done by
> > now. If you want to wait for someone else to do the work, it is going to
> > be done when others find time and interest to do it.
> 
> It would be very foolish for me to try to document NM.
> I recall with horror a HOWTO written by Karl you-know-who
> which was guaranteed to sow utter confusion in any reader.
> 
> But it always surprises me that a developer who must have spent weeks 
> if not months thinking about his pet project
> has never found it useful for him/her-self if no-one else
> to set down the basic principles of the project.
> I often think one of the advantages of democracy
> is that when politicians and bureaucrats are forced to document
> what they are doing they usually find that this increases 
> their own understanding, and so improves their performance.
> 
> Actually, the document you pointed to seems to me
> a pretty good starting point.
> 
> But the question it does not answer, and which it is obvious
> many users would like an answer to, is:
> "What can I do if NetworkManager does not connect me to my AP?
> How can I tell where it has broken down?
> And what steps can I take to solve the problem?"
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
-- 
                Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs