BOINC again !? -- BINGO, BINGO and BINGO

[Timothy Murphy]

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.

>> 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?"