Re: 2 questions...

[David Zeuthen <davidz redhat com>]

On Mon, 2005-07-25 at 16:54 -0400, Derek Atkins wrote:
> no offense intended, but I still disagree with that design choice.  It means you
> cannot use NM in a situation where you have wireless network and network-based
> login (e.g. Kerberos/Hesiod, NIS, etc).  In the current design you have to
> already be logged in in order to start the wireless network, which means you
> have to have a local account.
> 
> IMNSHO it would be much better to store this information globally so that NM can
> choose from pre-defined networks before the user is logged in.  This certainly
> works fine for WEP or unprotected networks, and even for shared-key WPA
> networks.  It might not work as well for interactive 802.1x authentication...
> 
> Even Windows will setup the network before the login process, assuming the
> wireless network was configured a priori!  How could Windows get something
> right and Linux not?

I've tried to argue for some time that the right solution here is
clearly to run nm-applet on top of, and managed by, your login manager,
e.g. gdm. 

- the UI will have to be a bit different and it will store keys in the
user 'nobody' gconf-tree, alternatively use keys from the system-wide
(or site-wide) default/mandatory gconf-trees.

- when someone logs in the nm-applet managed by gdm goes away and is
replaced with the nm-applet in the user session (this, similar schemes
for e.g. fast-user-switching).

Btw, we desperately need this kind of infrastructure in GNOME for other
things such as running gnome-volume-manager, gnome-screensaver,
gnome-power-manager etc. I proposed this [1] to be part of the GNOME
session services framework that people at Red Hat been working on; it
makes a lot of sense to me.

Cheers,
David

[1] : May be a bit out of context but here are the pointers
 http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2005-July/msg00136.html
 http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2005-July/msg00183.html