F12 networkmanager, anyone else worried by this?

[Bill Davidsen]

Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-07-22 at 12:10 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
>> 3. The connection is always lost (in my case) after Suspend to RAM.
> 
> This used to happen to me on F10, but doesn't on F11. The difference is
> in the Wifi driver, i.e. it's not a NetworkManager bug as such.
> 
NM does not preserve Wifi connections over suspend, whether you think that's a 
bug or not. On resume it often will remember to establish a connection, and 
picks the "best" AP (not the one you were using) and tries to connect to that. I 
don't know if it's picking the strongest signal, some unsecured signal it can 
hijack, or how it determines which AP to use, but if the one you want is not the 
strongest, or is encrypted, it better be the only signal.

And since NM is an afterthought, the network comes up and any VPN or NFS 
connections are not remembered. I can power down the NFS server, move it to a 
new rack, power it up, and the mount will still be there. But let me suspend to 
walk to a conference room and it's all gone.

The design (I assume there was one) was aimed at a one user laptop booted from 
cold, used in a home or hotspot, and shut down. The obvious things to make it 
useful for other common scenarios aren't there. That's not bad design, it's 
design for a limited set of use cases, which it handles quite well.

So the problem does not lie with a driver, the driver is not making the 
decisions, NM is. And they are really not bad decisions for the limited use 
envisioned, they are just totally out of touch with the way systems are used 
today, particularly netbooks.

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot