network profiles

[Bill Moss <bmoss clemson edu>]

I started a laptop program at my university and for the last few years 
have written a series of articles on how to set up Redhat and now Fedora 
Core on them. Since most of the students still use Windows XP so I have 
written about dual booting and made comparison's.

On the Windows XP side I consider the IBM Access Connections (IAC) 
utility to be the gold standard for NetworkManager type utilities. IAC 
maintains its own internal database of network profiles that contain 
very detailed information. NM does something similar with the gconf 
database. Using gconf-editor, you can add, edit, and remove keys in 
gconf but you cannot add a network using the gconf-editor. I suppose you 
could edit the XML file directly. I created a network entry for my 
campus where the essid's are hidden. I added to the addresses list the 
MAC's of all the AP's I normally see. If my campus ESSID and WEP key 
should change, I can easily edit these two keys.

Does NM need its own internal database? Personally I do not have the 
need to deal with static ip's anymore but for those that do, I can see 
that it would be advantageous to be able to go into the NM database and 
enter profiles that contained static ip's, dns, default printer, ... . 
If NM is going to have its own dhcp client, does it make sense to use 
the network profiles provided by the distribution. I think not. Like 
IAC, the NM applet should present a dropdown menu of all defined 
profiles and an option for starting the database editor, gconf-editor or 
whatever. IAC allows the user to turn on autoswitching and specify what 
to do when the current network is no longer available. IAC connnects 
with equal ease to my home network where the ESSID is broadcast and to 
my campus network where the ESSID's are hidden. This is something that 
NM currently does not do. Everytime I boot on campus, I have to select 
'Other Wireless Network' and re-enter the ESSID and WEP key.

--
Bill Moss
Professor, Mathematical Sciences
Clemson University