NetworkManager: A User's Review

[Charles Curley]

On Wed, Apr 26, 2006 at 05:19:54PM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Wednesday 26 April 2006 10:28, Charles Curley wrote:
> >What I do for wireless networking is a kludge of the first water.
> >


> 
> 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.

OK, I just went to duplicate your experiment, and carefully walked
through exactly the steps I usually take to get a failed
attempt. However, Murphy strikes again. I am now on my home network
using NM. Dammit, experiments should be repeatable! Including
failures!

The only change I can think of is that earlier today, I switched from
64 bit WEP to 128 bit WEP. But the same steps failed to get on the
network then. Go figure.

In any case, having gotten on the network with NM, iwconfig now
reports the network as having security "open", where previously it
reported it as restricted. Also, it now reports a data rate of 48 Mbs,
vs 54 earlier. However, since I took that sample, it has come up to
54.

> 
> Those little one paragraph man pages are at best useless.  

Oh, come on. They're at least risible. "The point of NetworkManager
is to make networking configuration and setup as painless and
automatic as possible." Doesn't that sound like something Catbert or
C.S. Lewis' Wormwood would write?

> 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.

Yeah, I also can use XP to connect to my home network in a similar
manner.

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

Well, you're ahead of me. I had nothing in /etc/NetworkManager/. But
then, I'd never gotten NM to connect to anything except a wide-open
network. Even after connecting to my home network via NM, I still have
nothing there. But I do have keys-eth1, (eth1 being the appropriate
device). It appears to have been created by system-config-network.

I don't have a firestarter file, but I do have firestarter installed
and the script in /etc/rc.d/initd. I have no idea if NM ran the script
or not, since the IP address is the same. OK, there's an experiment
for me to do.

> 
> 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?

What would help is if you could set up a network connection by any
means: hacking the script files, using system-config-network, or
cobbling it together with i[fw]config; and you could then tell NM,
"OK, bub, memorize this network and call it by this name."

But that would require being able to fire up the applet without having
the daemon running, something currently inhibited.

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

Nor me.

BTW, I was wrong: apparently, NM is doing some sort of qualification
of keys. I copied a 128 bit key via the clipboard into the Key:
widget, and only after I stripped out the dashes provided by iwconfig
did the "connect" button come ungreyed. Which is stupid: why not
accept a key in the format provided by iwconfig? But it seemed
perfectly happy with much shorter 64 bit keys. ???

And here's another problem with NM: If it makes a network connection
all by itself it puts up that cute popup window to tell you, which is
nice. The problem is, it also does that while the screen saver is
running, popping up the window over the blank screen. Is this a
security breach or what?

-- 

Charles Curley                  /"\    ASCII Ribbon Campaign
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