F10: too many Network headaches

[Richard England]

Andre Costa wrote:
> Hi Marcelo,
>
> On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 11:47, Marcelo Magno T. Sales 
> <mmtsales at gmail.com <mailto:mmtsales at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Andre,
>
>     Em Dom 30 Nov 2008, Andre Costa escreveu:
>     > Hi,
>     >
>     > I just installed F10 on my system (replacing -- not upgrading -- a
>     > previous F9 installation). In general, installation went by just
>     > fine. However, setting up my network has been unbelievably hard.
>     >
>     > I have a DI-624 router, and I am using static IP (I turned its DHCP
>     > server off because it was rebooting when my wife's MacBook Pro
>     > connected). This setup has worked flawlessly with F9 and even F8.
>     >
>     > First weird symptom: NetworkManager refuses to allow me to edit
>     > settings for eth0. It doesn't ask me for any kind of authentication
>     > and simply shows all fields disabled. I don't know why it started
>     > doing this, because right after I booted for the first time I was
>     > able to edit it. Later on I disabled SELinux, don't know if this is
>     > related somehow. This is specially annoying because I can't
>     configure
>     > DNS servers this way, and must always edit /etc/resolv.conf
>     manually.
>     >
>     > Second weird symptom: System > Administration > Network Device
>     > Control didn't show any interfaces I could manage (maybe this is the
>     > correct behavior when NetworkManger is in charge, I don't know...)
>     >
>     > So, I turned NM off and switched back to plain system-config-network
>     > (which I'd rather not do, since I need to use NetworkManager every
>     > now and then to manage a GSM modem).
>     >
>     > To my surprise, even though I try to set my subnet mask to
>     > 255.255.255.0 <http://255.255.255.0>, it was setting it to my IP
>     address (192.168.0.100 <http://192.168.0.100>), or
>     > sometimes to my gateway address (192.168.0.1
>     <http://192.168.0.1>). I had to manually go
>     > through the files at /etc/sysconfig/network/ to fix this. Also,
>     s-c-n
>     > allowed me to create a copy of eth0 profile, but didn't allow me to
>     > remove it (had to do it manually as well).
>     >
>     > Right now everything is working just fine I guess, but if I reenable
>     > NM it screws things up again.
>     >
>     > AFAICS I'm probably experiencing many bugs at once (NM and s-c-n).
>     > Anyone experienced anything like this? Should I start filing bug
>     > reports?
>
>     It seems that, for using static IP address, it's indeed better to use
>     the old network daemon than NetworkManager. I had the same problem too
>     and have read many, many reports of similar ones on the net.
>     Regarding the system-config-network problem with the netmask, this is
>     already reported in Redhat's bugzilla and a new version of system-
>     config-network which solves the problem has already been push to
>     updates. It's not available for download yet, but should be in the
>     next
>     few days. For now, if you want to use static addresses, you need
>     to edit
>     the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth* files to correct the
>     netmask.
>
> Thks for the info, indeed something is really broken with NM + static 
> IP, I just can't make it work -- and, worst of all, it screws a 
> working eth0 configuration. It's really a pity,  because I rely on NM 
> to manage my non-eth0 connections, losing it will imply much more 
> manual work. And, it was working on F9...
> But, it doesn't help to keep moaning about it (aside from the fact 
> that it sucks this got past QA =/ ), I'll file a bug report if one 
> doesn't exist already and hope this gets fixed soon.
> ... I just searched Bugzilla and found this one, seems to be what I am 
> experiencing:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=473002
> I'll leave a comment describing my problem hoping it will help 
> catching attention to this problem.
> Regards,
> Andre

Did you all stop and disable the NetworkManager service before you 
enabled and started to try configure the network settings in the older 
manner?

chkconfig --level 012345 NetworkManger off