F11: NetworkManager woes

[lanas]

A sincere thanks to all who took the time to reply on my previous
queries.

Do not get me wrong, I really am 95% satisfied with F11.  And that's
after doing a F9 to F8 'upgrade', and rejecting altogether F10.  I'm
really up to getting F11 (x86_64) both at work and at home.

And so far so good, but...

Here's what's up with that thing called NetworkManager.

When I right-click on the NetworkManager applet icon and edit the
connections (eth0 and eth1) all parameters are A-1 OK.  eth0 through
DHCP, eth1 static.  But no matter what I do, the NetworkManager
craplet will initialize eth0 to 192.168.10.110/24 and will do nothing
with eth1.  It will also initialize resolv.conf to:

cat /etc/resolv.conf
# Generated by NetworkManager
domain Trendnet
search Trendnet
nameserver 192.168.10.1

I reckon this is partly generated by the dchp client, although it
does not say so in the file.  'Trendnet' is certainly the making of
dhcp client, as well as the nameserver IP.  Obviously these are not
right for our network.

Where does it get that IP as well as the .110 IP ?  

And of course, it did not save the previous resolv.conf. Fortunately I
have the settings in the previous F8 system still on disk so I don't
have to bug the IT dept.

And worst, that's after a reboot (after trying to restart the
NetworkManager several times and verifying the configuration).  Yes,
the famous MS Windows style: reboot.

So now I have to make a script to initialize the LAN interfaces.

Is there a way to disable the NetworkManager stuff and come back to
what it used to be on Fedora 8 ?  I need to switch off/on the network
interfaces on a periodic basis.  The following used to work nicely in F8:

/etc/init.d/network start
/etc/init.d/network stop 

The bad thing is that it is seemingly involved to disinfect (wording
might be too strong) the F11 system from the NetworkManager because it
seemingly signalizes other applications about network availability, or
make available network status for other apps to consult.  Firefox and
claws-mail for instance seems to rely on NM histrionics to put
themselves in offline or online modes.  Starting the network
interfaces manually then would not change this status if the currently
useless Manager (but certainly overpaid and overrated!) does not
approve.  But I could live with that.  I could toggle Firefox and
claws-mail manually.  That's the extent to which I'd like to keep F11
at work.

Setting the ip manually works, but The Manager might come by and
change that at any time it deems worthed to do so.  It'll also
overwrite the resolv.conf file with the following when it stops.  (I
guess it is some final menace of some sort ;-)

# No nameservers found; try putting DNS servers into your
# ifcfg files in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts like so:
#
# DNS1=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
# DNS2=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
# DOMAIN=lab.foo.com bar.foo.com

So I can '/etc/init.d/NetworkManager stop' it.

Is there then a --force switch to yell at NM to do its thing right
from the command line ?  Or some other way to make it do what it
claims (eg. configuration settings in the applet) it'll do ?  I do not
mind making a script to kill it and restart it every time I need to,
although I've already did 'restart' with /etc/init/d/NetworkManager
and that did not solve anything.  If there are any file to erase, DBUS
pipe and tubes stuff to clean, a config to automatically regenerate, I
do not mind: I'll put that in a script.

Anyone making it w/o the NetworkManager ?  

Thanks for any suggestions/advice/hints.