NetworkManager: A User's Review

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Wed, 26 Apr 2006, 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.

What do you have for a wirless card?  I don't have a problem accessing the
hidden SSID at work (unless some student is in range with an ad-hoc 
network with the same SSID).

>
> 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,

Not.  IIRC, Windows wirless manager doesn't need '0x' and doesn't tell you 
it doesn't either.  A "wireless illiterate" wouldn't think to put in '0x' 
anyway unless he was used to system-config-network.

> 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.

Haven't used kwifimanager, but I'm not sure what you mean here.

>
> 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.

I've never had to stop and restart the daemon just to reenter logon data. 
In fact, I wouldn't think it would help.  Once the data is in your config, 
it doesn't go away when you restart.  Just select "connect to other 
wireless network" and you get a fresh dialog.  I have had to restart the 
daemon because buggy wireless drivers get hung up, but that's not the same 
thing.

>
> 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

# chkconfig NetworkManager on

Then it starts at boot and is always on.

> 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.

If you'd like to see the tool improved (I don't want to appear to be 
suggesting that your critique is baseless), you should really post to 
networkmanager-list at gnome.org (subscribe at mail.gnome.org), where the 
developers hang out.

-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

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